This is the first monograph dedicated to contemporary artist TR Ericsson (b. 1972), who with conceptual rigor and emotional directness uses the archives chronicling his family’s painful past to explore the healing powers of commemoration and memory.

He grapples with these archival materials’ power to define both the past and future, even as they vanish slowly with time. In a poignant family chronology in text and images, Ericsson includes many photographs of his mother— whose suicide at age 57 was a traumatic turning point in his life and career— along with related photographs, documents, writings, film stills, and artifacts dating back to the 1930s. Two scholarly essays set Ericsson’s work into its artistic and broader cultural context.

The complete publication 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.