This is the first monograph devoted to contemporary artist TR Ericsson (b. 1972), who uses archives recounting his family's painful past with conceptual rigour and emotional candour to explore the healing powers of commemoration and memory.
 
 
 
He grapples with the power of these archival materials to define both the past and the future, even as they slowly fade over time. In a moving family chronology in words and images, Ericsson includes many photographs of his mother, whose suicide at 57 was a traumatic turning point in his life and career, alongside photographs, documents, writings, film stills and related artefacts dating back to the 1930s. Two scholarly essays place Ericsson's work in its broader artistic and cultural context.
 
 
 
The publication as a whole is both a guide to the artist's work and an inspired chronicle of several generations of a Midwestern family, evoking universal themes of love and loss.