TR Ericsson: Crackle & Drag

 TR Ericsson employs photo-based work, sculptural objects, and cinema to create installations that provide a ruthlessly honest, yet tender portrait of his mother, who committed suicide at age 57, and of the triangulated relationships between three generations within one Northeastern Ohio family. Ericsson is involved in an ongoing investigation and reinterpretation of a deteriorating archive of family artifacts, documents, writings, and photographs. Crackle & Drag makes a personal struggle public, coming to terms with the archive’s power to determine the past and the future, even as it vanishes in time. The exhibition’s title is taken from the final line of Sylvia Plath’s poem “Edge”: “Staring from her hood of bone./She is used to this sort of thing. Her blacks crackle and drag.”