TR Ericsson

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TR Ericsson (Cleveland, 1972) is an American visual artist whose epic work Crackle & Drag concerns his mother who suicided. With conceptual rigor and emotional directness, Ericsson uses his personal archives to present a searing, soft, and complex portrait of post-industrial life in the American Midwest. Described by New York Times art critic Holland Cotter as “a subtle storyteller” Ericsson’s autobiographical sculptures and installations employ a wide range of media that give new life and poignancy to the old archives. Reconstructing the past from the vantage point of the present he explores the healing powers of commemoration and the pitfalls of memory. His work invokes issues of domestic violence, mental illness, suicide, love, loss and financial struggle by featuring individuals in multigenerational narratives within a single family. Crackle & Drag repeatedly affirms that there is no such thing as an everyday existence. The end of the world is unique every time. Ericsson creates art of the most romantic, raw and revealing variety.

Life and career

Ericsson studied briefly at The Cleveland Institute of Art before moving to New York City in 1991 where he attended the Art Students League of New York, lived in the 92nd Street Y and generated income by painting portraits and playing semi-professional pool. In 2003, his life and career took drastic turns when his mother committed suicide. This marked the beginning of the mixed-media project Crackle & Drag for which the artist is best known. Working from an archive of objects, images, documents, recordings and other mementos, Ericsson has shown innovative craftsmanship using materials such as smoke, ashes, bronze, powdered graphite, glass, granite and ceramics. His work is at once a testament of 100 years of a family’s life in the American Midwest and a prolific series of objects, images and installations, which tell non-linear tales from and for the future.

Zines and Monograph

Ericsson organized the documents, photographs, recordings, letters and objects left behind by his mother and grandparents into a digital archive and created 150 zines, which catalogue his family’s history. This was a laborious task that led to different narrative structures, and pushed Ericsson further into zine and artist book culture. Since 2015, Ericsson has also been the curator of Bound, an art zine fair produced by MOCA Cleveland. His monograph, Crackle & Drag was published by Yale University Press in collaboration with Barbara Tannenbaum Chief Curator of Photography at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Film

The film Crackle & Drag(2015), a 48min "film-poem" and "haunting epitaph of maternal and filial love structured around a series of biographical vignettes and narrated by several audio voice recordings left on the artist's answering machine by his late mother in the mid 90's and early 2000's", premiered in Belgium at Harlan Levey Projects in September 2015 before being presented in North American film festivals.

Exhibitions, collections and awards

Notable acquisitions of artist books, works on paper and sculptures, include those by the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Fine Arts Library of the Harvard Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Progressive Collection, the Whitney Museum, the Yale University Arts Library, the Museum of Modern Art Library, and the Smithsonian Institution Libraries.

Following a solo exhibition at the Transformer Station (Cleveland Museum of Art 2015), in 2016, he was the recipient of the Print Center’s annual international award and his monograph was shortlisted at the Aperture (2015) and Kraszna Krausz (2016) awards.

In 2017, “Crackle & Drag” was also the subject of a solo exhibition at the Everson Museum of Art and in July, 2018, Ericsson installed three large bronze works in Northeast Ohio (alongside those from artists including Sol Lewitt, Roxy Paine, AI Wei Wei, and Andrew Goldsworthy) prior to opening a significant exhibition in Brussels titled “Industrial Poems” after a work made by Marcel Broodthaers in 1972.

References

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