TR Ericsson: I Was Born To Bring You Into This World
Everson Museum of Art: September 16– January 29, 2018
“Honey you don’t know what love is. I was born to bring you into this world, my only purpose in this life was to bring you into this world. I was made for you, just you, everything else has been a mistake except you.”
—Susan Ericsson
I don’t remember when she said that to me but she said it. I must have written it down or something because I’m sure these were her exact words, and it’s exactly how she spoke. It might have been a recording I transcribed and lost, again, I don’t remember, but what a crazy thing to say to your only kid and what a loving and challenging thing to say. She was right. I didn’t know what love was. Even if I thought I did, I really didn’t. And she did bring me into this world, the world she left by suicide in 2003. I keep trying to tell her story over and over again always hoping I’ll finally get it right. But there’s really no end to this sort of thing. You just go as far as you can.
—TR Ericsson
“For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.”
—James Baldwin, Sonny’s Blues
Angel of the Morning
I Was Born To Bring You Into This World is a specific
re-interpretation of Crackle & Drag, TR Ericsson’s ongoing project that began following his mother’s suicide in 2003. Titled from the final lines of Sylvia Plath’s Edge, Crackle & Drag has become a son’s relentless attempt to wrap his hands and mind around the complexity of his mother.
This publication is a companion for the exhibition, clarifying facts and detailing the primary cast of characters, their relationships, birth dates, marriages, divorces, and dates of death (for those who have them). With the facts in hand, we can dig into the texture, focusing less on the details of how and what happened, and more on the nuanced and ambiguous territory of why things happened and their significance.
Framed as a searing, soft, and complex portrait of post-industrial life in middle-class America, the story of his mother, Susan Ericsson, is an intensely personal examination and public exposure of the gritty details of the life of a woman whose heartbreak she found mirrored in Juice Newton’s Angel of the Morning. With a distinct voice, she loved and hated in equal proportions, drank too much, was loyal, misunderstood, insightful beyond expectation, unreasonable, and ultimately took her own life.
Two of the most accessible ways to preserve one’s legacy and to seed a lineage is through writing books and having babies. Through cultural objects and procreation, it is possible to achieve some sort of non-corporeal immortality. Both of these are fundamental to I Was Born To Bring You Into This World. Joseph Beuys said, “Art alone makes life possible…” and if we define life in opposition to death, Ericsson’s life practice roots itself in a radical manipulation of the power of a museum—an institution devoted to the procurement, care, study, and display of objects of lasting interest or value—to, shall we say, return the favor and bring his mother into this world. In this way, the conventional relationship of life and death are flipped and, for Ericsson, death begets life.
—DJ Hellerman, Curator of Art & Programs