The Brooklyn Rail

Over the past twenty years TR Ericsson has used his family’s history—in the form of photographs, letters, keepsakes and all manner of ephemera—as an ever-evolving frame for considering the act of remembrance as a continuous, even inexhaustible, source of creativity and narrative possibility. Within his family tree, Ericsson’s primary focus—the point around which all else seems to orbit—is his relationship with his mother, Sue, and the reverberations of her death by suicide in 2003. Though his multi-disciplinary project Crackle & Drag was first begun in 2000, the death of his mother and then, over the following five years, of nearly all members on the maternal side of his family, the side most responsible for raising him, prompted Ericsson to adjust its purpose and reconfigure its material outline, such that “it became an attempt to reclaim her life, and even my life after her death by way of art.” One body of work that has grown out of the evolution of Crackle & Drag is Nicotine. Previously exhibited as unique photochemical objects, they have now been edited and sequenced together into an intensely tactile and deeply poetic book about love, pain, longing and hopefulness, and about how memory can deliver these experiences to us while misleading us along the way.

The images in Nicotine originated as photographs that Ericsson culled from his mother’s family photo albums; they have about them that vernacular quality of being direct, at times even poignant, without necessarily being artful or formally self-aware. What is familiar in them is transformed, however, by Ericsson’s process (which is helpfully detailed in the back of the book). After the original photographs are turned into film positives, they then become silkscreens. Ericsson then places the silkscreen over a box-like construction, in the middle of which is an ashtray filled with a variable number of lit cigarettes. As the smoke passes through the dot matrix of the silk mesh, the paper behind it gradually becomes stained with the image embedded in the screen (though colorless by itself, when nicotine combines with oxygen it produces a range of yellow, sepia, and golden hues). The tonal value of each image, along with its representational clarity, is dependent upon how many cigarettes are burned in the process of its making, which can range from hundreds to several thousand for a single work.

Ericsson decided to use nicotine as an aesthetic material when he discovered that the walls of his mother’s house were stained yellow (she was a lifelong cigarette smoker). Though using materials that might seem to have no aesthetic value or descriptive potential is a consistent feature in Ericsson’s work (he has also made use of his mother’s funerary ashes, for example), the images in Nicotine are unique for the visual effect of the material, which also functions as an integrated, figurative expression of how we modify and distort the past through the very act of remembrance.

Consisting of just twenty-six pictures (twenty-seven if you include the cover image), each hand-tipped onto thick dark blue paper, the expressive power of the book moves back and forth between its own materiality and what the images create both individually and through sequence. On the cover, Ericsson’s mother is ethereal, glowing, and, as with so many of these images, seemingly on the verge of dissolving into the space around her. The book channels the essence of a family photo album, but without a linear relationship to time: the pictures of Sue and Ericsson that appear throughout have decades between them, from one page to the next. His maternal grandparents, father, and some friends appear as well, as do images of objects we can imagine having sentimental value, such as a locket with Ericsson’s name on it. With the exception of his mother, none of these relationships are necessarily made explicit. In spite of what is at times a kind of referential insularity (not only are these people strangers to us, but their narrative relation is often opaque either visually, contextually, or both) the images remain undeniably beautiful and serene, mysterious and compelling all at once. At their most effective they fuse together what is unique and still discernible in them with an aesthetic quality that seems to capture the psychological and tactile sensation of time passing—a quality which allows the specific to be a conduit to the universal, without one overtaking the other. Though he is able to draw upon our familiarity with the conventional use of sepia tones for conveying age or the passage of time, Ericsson’s expression of this palette feels altogether new and distinctly his own. They may not be our memories infused in the pictures, but we can still sense they are being wrestled with and vividly felt.

Ericsson walks this tightrope between private relevance and universal narrative in Nicotine, particularly when his images are abstracted to the point where none of their original content remains legible and instead they appear only as evidence of process or stylistic effect. Ericsson shows us not only what memory feels like, but also what it can look like. Images which are alluring yet descriptively opaque are as much a part of the experience of memory as are their more documentative source material. When abstraction overwhelms recognizable form, the images embody one of Ericsson’s subtler insights, namely that by remembering the past we endeavor to remake the present.