I Was Born To Bring You Into This World

Angel of the Morning by DJ Hellerman

I Was Born To Bring You Into This World is a specific reinterpretation of Crackle & Drag, an ongoing project by TR Ericsson started during the years following his mother’s suicide in 2003. Titled after the final lines of Sylvia Plath’s 1963 poem Edge, Crackle & Drag has become a project about a son’s relentless attempt to adequately wrap his hands and mind around the complexity of his mother.

 Through this ongoing reinterpretation of material taken from an ever deteriorating archive of heirlooms and personal artifacts, Ericsson has been engaged in a radical act of public story telling that evolves and morphs along with the undulations of a turbulent world.

We’ve framed the story of his mother, Susan Ericsson, as a searing, soft, and complex portrait of post-industrial life in middle-class America. But, these grand declarations are constructed through an intensely personal examination and public exposure of the gritty details of the life of a woman whose laugh was unforgettable, loved and hated in equal proportions, drank too much, was loyal, misunderstood, insightful beyond expectation, unreasonable, and who ultimately took her own life.

The specific, personal, and subjective story of Susan Ericsson provides a potent opportunity to reflect and scrutinize the trials and tribulations of our own lives.

This publication is a companion for the exhibition. It makes clear some of the facts by 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, not focusing so heavily on the details of how and what happened, but on the more nuanced and ambiguous territory of why things happened and their significance.

The story presented in this exhibition is more conventionally and comfortably handled as a literary genre: fiction, memoir, auto-biography etc.  Essentially, this is subject matter and content commonly found in text, not an object. It is fit for the page, not the wall.

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 or procreation it is possible to achieve some sort of non-corporal immortality. Both of these are fundamental to I Was Born To Bring You Into This World.

The infamous and extraordinarily underestimated quote by Joseph Beuys “Everyone is an artist” is often interpreted literally. But, the brilliance behind Beuys’s comment is more than a simple exaltation of human existence. The essence of an artistic life, what artists do as a vocation is to expose themselves and their objects to the gaze of others. To varying degrees of depth and transparency, all artists must engage in this process.

Ericsson’s artistic process is a life practice, not a studio practice. His art is lived publicly within a self-conscious, self-implicating archival obsession taking full advantage of old fashioned technology: clay, canvas, silk-screen, and the camera to record the story.

If as Beuys suggests, “Art alone makes life possible…” and 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.