B-Sides: SHAHEEN Modern and contemporary art, Cleveland, OH
Current exhibition
B-side
SUE ROBINSON (b.1946)
37506 ARTHUR STREET
WILLOUGHBY, OH
c. 1964
(screened image of snapshot) The scale of the original photograph.
“You should have seen how he smashed my car that I got for graduation, who got it for you but he smashed it such a way that the car man couldn’t believe anyone could do something like that. He cracked the engine block which is almost impossible and then he beat me up. I was outside. I didn't know what was wrong with the car and he did and he came storming into the dining room and he threw me to the floor, knocked me to the floor and proceeded to knock my head into the floor…
“Don’t hurt her too bad, Lynn.”
…grabbing me by the hair and beating me. We were all too scared, you never saw him at his worst. We always lived in fear with him. When he went out of town we were all so happy. It was a terrible life living with him … I walked up to my girlfriend's house and told her what happened and they wanted me to call the police but that’s something else—I could never call the cops on him, the doctors think that the beating I took is probably what gave me the migraines.”
My mother’s father, Lynn Robinson, took the original snapshot. He took all the photographs, unless of course he was in them.
The enlarged text quotation is from a voice recording I made of my mother in 2002, the year before her sudden death at age 57 and a few months after her father died in a nursing home at age 84. I lost the recording, I may have taped over it, but before it was gone I typed it out word for word in its entirety. She had never before expressed to me so clearly or candidly the resentment she felt toward her father than she did during this recording of which this is only a small fragment.
I imagine the work being seen from both sides, like a sculpture. These idealized, or nostalgic and eventually meaningless snapshots hold secret narratives they seldom reveal. If all anyone sees is the woman, my mother, and the car, I would consider the work incomplete and devoid of meaning.
TR Ericsson, Brooklyn, NY
May 28, 2024
TR ERICSSON (b.1972)
236 6TH AVENUE,
BROOKLYN, NY,
c. 2024
SUE ROBINSON (b.1946)
37506 ARTHUR STREET
WILLOUGHBY, OH
c. 1964
(screened image of snapshot) The scale of the original photograph.
“You should have seen how he smashed my car that I got for graduation, who got it for you but he smashed it such a way that the car man couldn’t believe anyone could do something like that. He cracked the engine block which is almost impossible and then he beat me up. I was outside. I didn't know what was wrong with the car and he did and he came storming into the dining room and he threw me to the floor, knocked me to the floor and proceeded to knock my head into the floor…
“Don’t hurt her too bad, Lynn.”
…grabbing me by the hair and beating me. We were all too scared, you never saw him at his worst. We always lived in fear with him. When he went out of town we were all so happy. It was a terrible life living with him … I walked up to my girlfriend's house and told her what happened and they wanted me to call the police but that’s something else—I could never call the cops on him, the doctors think that the beating I took is probably what gave me the migraines.”
My mother’s father, Lynn Robinson, took the original snapshot. He took all the photographs, unless of course he was in them.
The enlarged text quotation is from a voice recording I made of my mother in 2002, the year before her sudden death at age 57 and a few months after her father died in a nursing home at age 84. I lost the recording, I may have taped over it, but before it was gone I typed it out word for word in its entirety. She had never before expressed to me so clearly or candidly the resentment she felt toward her father than she did during this recording of which this is only a small fragment.
I imagine the work being seen from both sides, like a sculpture. These idealized, or nostalgic and eventually meaningless snapshots hold secret narratives they seldom reveal. If all anyone sees is the woman, my mother, and the car, I would consider the work incomplete and devoid of meaning.
TR Ericsson, Brooklyn, NY
May 28, 2024
TR ERICSSON (b.1972)
236 6TH AVENUE,
BROOKLYN, NY,
c. 2024