Book of the Week: A Pick by TR Ericsson

Book of the Week Book of the Week: A Pick by TR Ericsson TR Ericsson selects The Hollow of the Hand by PJ Harvey and Seamus Murphy as Book of the Week.

The Hollow of the Hand. 
Text by PJ Harvey. Photographs by Seamus Murphy.
Bloomsbury USA, 2015.

This week's Book of the Week pick comes from TR Ericsson who has selected The Hollow of the Hand by PJ Harvey and Seamus Murphy published by Bloomsbury USA.

"My affection for this book began with my love for PJ Harvey's acclaimed 2011 album Let England Shake — the urgency of the songs, the intimacy and compassion, the lyrical rage against the violence of our world and a breathtaking artistry and diversity to the melodies and rhythms of the music. She revisits this beautiful and troubling record in this new book. She and her collaborator, photographer Seamus Murphy, travel to Kosovo, Afghanistan and Washington DC and both document their experiences, Seamus Murphy with photography and PJ Harvey with words.

There is death and suffering and destruction in this book. Both artists are looking and listening, and completely open to the pain they witness in abundance. It becomes more than art, purer than art, and that’s the most compelling accomplishment of this perfect book — the more-difficult-than-it-would-seem ability to simply let these people and places tell their own stories, be what they really are, powerfully undistorted.

In one of the Kosovo poems a woman laments…

Now all I do is wait

…while in Washington DC A Guy Who Knows What the Fuck’s Going On (the poem’s title) concludes:

that’s how it is here in America
—it’s just so simple man—people are jus’ paid an’ bought an’ shit
an’ that’s the whole fucking bottom line

Like her earlier album, every image and every word is urgently and skillfully delivered. And yet amidst the pain a sort of beauty lingers, a sympathetic awareness and an earnest watchfulness. A knowing sadness that says it has always been this way and we will always want it not to be.

Let me watch night fall on the river
The moon rise up and turn to silver
The sky move, the ocean shimmer
The hedge shake, the last living rose quiver"

—TR Ericsson

Purchase Book

The Hollow of the Hand. Text by PJ Harvey. Photographs by Seamus Murphy. Bloomsbury USA, 2015.

The Hollow of the Hand. Text by PJ Harvey. Photographs by Seamus Murphy. Bloomsbury USA, 2015.

TR Ericsson’s work has appeared in solo and group exhibitions in the United States and abroad including those with Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp, Switzerland; Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, NY; Paul Kasmin Gallery, NY, and Harlan Levey Projects, Brussels. Ericsson’s work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Yale University Library (Special Collections) and the Progressive Art Collection as well numerous private collections.

The artist's first solo museum exhibition TR Ericsson: Crackle & Drag opened at the Cleveland Museum of Art on May 23, 2015. A monograph/artist’s book designed by the artist, published by the Cleveland Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press was published to accompany the exhibition.

http://www.trericsson.com

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