Through the Woods TR Ericsson's innovative works express a new style of loneliness The artist TR Ericsson stands in the woods wearing a dark suit. Each of the thirteen graphite on paper works on view at a solo exhibit titled “Narcissus” at Shaheen Modern and Contemporary Gallery shows him in a slightly different position, but with his head always bent, his hand to his ear. This gesture would have meant nothing twenty years ago, but now of course we recognize at once what’s going on; the guy’s talking on a cell phone. In his distraction, like Dante in the opening lines of the “Inferno” as much as like mythical Narcissus ignoring the nymph Echo, Ericsson appears to have wandered off the path; in several of the pictures he stands knee-deep in weeds, his shins blocked by fallen branches. One might think, how ironic, but there’s an atmosphere in these drawings, as Ericsson calls them, an air of romance and elegy, that isn’t at all ironic. The figure seems not merely self-absorbed but poised at the threshold of another world, about to be beamed up, or maybe down, and not because he’s chatting with his starship. The vision is too classical, the graphite, forced through a silk screen in a laborious, physically taxing process (despite beginning with digital files), too cloud-wracked and poetic. The drawings are like photographs, but they’ve undergone a transformation, as if at a molecular level -- charged with pixie dust, infused with a sincerity that reads as psychically energetic, even spiritual. The artist’s face is all but invisible, blurred and averted. In several of the drawings he’s seen at a distance of twenty yards or more, a figure in a landscape. Nothing about him is certain, not even his appearance. Questions arise. If this person is in some sense Narcissus, where is Echo? Is she the photographer? And if not, who is? The works become more mysterious, rather than less. Nor does a closer look help to understand how these pieces are made; from an inch away or from across the room they are unsolvable, partaking equally of photography and the gritty, fire-born qualities of charcoal drawing. The seamless mix is visually frustrating, and for that reason slightly disturbing. And the mystery of their manner of production gradually lends the puzzle of their vantage point more urgency: in fact, who is following this young man around, with what intentions? Is he being depicted, spied upon, stalked? Ericsson depicts presence from the POV of absence in drawings which drift toward cinema in their frame of reference, tinged with the wireless paranoia of a brand new style of loneliness. “When?” is not among the questions asked by these works; the time is now. There’s a back-story here that fills in some of the gaps, and pretty much contradicts the apparent narrative content of the drawings. It’s not printed on the wall or available in a pamphlet, but it is hinted at in a secondary exhibit of Ericsson’s work, also currently on view a few miles away in University Circle at the Sculpture Center. Called “Thanksgiving,” that show consists of a five foot square, two inch thick absolute black granite slab resting just millimeters above the Center’s battered floorboards in a storefront gallery space on Euclid Avenue. If the images of Ericsson at Shaheen show a slightly disheveled young man -- formal white shirt untucked, collar open, tie discarded, looking as if he had just stepped away from a wedding party, or a funeral, for a moment’s conversation with a friend – that’s not far from the mark. Over the past few years several deaths in Ericsson’s family culminated in the suicide of his mother. In the shadow of this period he asked his sixteen year-old brother to take a few digital shots of him wandering in the woods. In a recent conversation the artist told me he forgot all about the camera on that late summer afternoon as he got lost in a long conversation with a friend who had troubles of his own. Audiences peer down at the inscription on the stone like Narcissus gazing into his pure woodland pool. Etched on the polished granite are a thousand or so words of text, completely filling the dark stone surface. The word-for-word transcription of a 1993 letter Ericsson’s mother wrote to him after he left home to go to New York gives an account of the family Thanksgiving, conducted in his absence. It quickly becomes clear that the young Ericsson was lucky to have missed this particular occasion. Like a scene from an Edward Albee play, Mrs. Ericsson’s description of the car ride with her parents to dinner at her brother’s house is a sharply drawn sketch of the way family members ignore, misunderstand, abuse, blame, and hold one another responsible for the pain of living. We recognize all this from our own experience, to a greater or lesser extent; it seems only appropriate to see our images floating in the dark stone behind the bitter words. And yet the letter ends on a nearly upbeat, defiantly loving note: “Be happy and carefree forever = Do it your way and tell the rest to shut up. Love Always.” Ericsson makes work about people, places and things that aren’t there – which is what every work of art does, but rarely with such active fidelity; his drawings don’t seem so much like windows cut out of the walls of the present, but like electronic screens buzzing with a presence of their own -- not a view but a rival perspective. It’s difficult to finish looking at an Ericsson piece, perhaps because his work seems, like Narcissus, to be busy with its own, very private agenda; every work, every object is careless of the observer and cruel to the advances of desire, but Ericsson finds ways to intensify such estrangement. After reading his mother’s letter twice, and regarding the way the tomb-like slab expanded under the eye, a pond full of words not rectangular as most human memorials are, but square, like the foundation of a pyramid, I slipped back into my own mind unobserved and walked away, as if I had gone skinny dipping in a different life. |
