I made this work in 2007 for a show in Chicago titled Andy Warhol; Factory Now. Ultra Violet, Steve Joester, William John Kennedy, Ivy Nicholson and Anton Perichhad, who I believe were at one time associated with Warhol’s Factory, all had works in the show.

In the days following my mother’s sudden and unexpected death in June of 2003, I took things out of her house, including this black plastic ashtray, which was filled with her cigarette butts. I didn’t think of it at the time but the ashtray became a kind of reliquary object. Picking it up off the dining room table and knowing then that only hours and a day before she had had these same cigarettes pressed between her lips and had stubbed them out with her own hand. I kept the ashtray, the butts and the ashes sealed in a ziplock bag for three years before I took the photograph I used to make the silkscreened image.

I photographed the ashtray on the concrete floor of my studio in Ohio repeatedly photographing it with a point and shoot digital camera until I got the curling smoke to look right. I scattered silver foil stars around the ashtray. This was a game my mother and I played when I first left home in my late teens to study art in New York. We would surprise each other by filling our letters with confetti stars that spilled out of the envelope when we opened the letters, she started it. I first coated the canvas in silver thinking of the stars but also thinking of the image as a kind of theatrical film still (a silver screen) then I added the black inked image of the ashtray and smoldering cigarette. Unlike Warhol, who made numerous prints from a single screen, I made only one.

After the show in Chicago the ashtray picture remained boxed up in the the attic of my studio for seventeen years until late last year when David Totah and the artist David Austen chose to include the work in a group show opening at TOTAH Gallery on February 8 (which coincidentally is my mother’s birthday), a show titled Clockwise. Seeing this picture and thinking about it after all this time it’s been fascinating for me to consider all the works and exhibitions that came after this and how easily I can relate all the work that followed back to this simple image.

TR Ericsson, Brooklyn, NY, January 2024