Since the untimely death of his mother in 2003, TR Ericsson has obsessively constructed an expansive and conceptual mixed-media project investigating the lives of the artist, his family and the changing cultural landscape that impacted each generation. At the core of his practice is a desire to understand what one can know about another’s suffering and the value of that understanding. Ericsson begins with an archive of inherited photographs and documents, repurposing these artifacts with traditional as well as experimental art materials to develop a series of intertwining narratives centered around the artist’s mother. These intimate vignettes expand into universal declarations on time, love, loss, memory, and addiction. Works presented at OFFSCREEN are blown-up snapshots created with materials that reveal the complexity of the paternal bond: Cocktail paintings infused with nicotine and alcohol, haunted images glittering with gold. The tobacco brown B side of each painting divulges elements of his archive in a compositional approach operating between literature, philosophy, and intimate confession.

This ongoing project has been exhibited and acquired by museums across the USA including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art (NY) and many other private and public collections. A work from this series was a recent finalist in the Smithsonian Museum of American Art’s national portraiture competition and has traveled to multiple museums in the United States. In 2024, TBW Books released a publication dedicated to earlier nicotine works.

Harlan Levey Projects (HLP) works closely with a select group of artists, tending for narrative-driven, conceptual and often research-based work, which explores various social, scientific and technological phenomena. HLP artists are represented in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art (NY), The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Dallas Museum of Art, The Centre Pompidou (Paris & Brussels), Kunsthaus Zürich, S.M.A.K. - The Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent, and many other museum and library collections in Europe and the United States.