Written by Makenna Karas

Photo Edited by Max Amos-Flom

We were all born into an ephemeral world. It never promised us permanence, we have reached out for it all on our own. Good art extends that reach. It takes a moment, a second, a click of a shutter, and offers up a record of something that has long since gone away from us, but that happened nonetheless. We can be sure of that.

This desire to freeze dissolving moments is exactly what artist Adam Ekberg explores in his exhibit “Minor Spectacles”, a series of photographs documenting occurrences that existed only for the second that it took to capture them. Growing out of the original exhibit that ran from January through September of 2023 at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, the series is the product of Ekberg’s mission to capture the beauty of ordinary things, creating stains of proof that time cannot easily scrub away.

There is a train of motion barrelling through each photo that cultivates an illusion of continuity, an illusion that this might never have to end. When you look at the pumpkin in “Pumpkin Trampoline”, suspended in mid-air, your mind fills in the blank. You can almost see it moving, bouncing in a perpetual motion that can only be imagined. It suggests that endless continuity, of moments and of ourselves, can only ever be illusory. Ekberg himself states that he wants these photos to have the feeling that they “potentially could kind of go on forever”.

He fosters a similar illusion in his shot “Minor Shelter”, where a stream of milk is captured as it shoots through the air, ricocheting off of a cocktail umbrella, and pooling onto the floor. At first glance, there is again the temptation to craft a narrative of continuity. There is motion there and we want to watch it forever. Yet we know that the milk will run out, that its existence expired just moments after the shot, offering a new appreciation for it. He takes a carton of milk and turns it into a beautiful thing that you don’t want to lose, but will.

Running alongside this ephemerality of the series resides an element of precarity that adds further potency to the viewing experience. In “Balloon Tree”,, we are invited to juxtapose the fragility of the balloons with the sturdiness of the forest. By constructing a tree out of colorful balloons, icons of impermanent joy, Ekberg seems to be inviting us into a world that exposes our own reality as fragile, mortal beings wading through a world that will outlast us.

So, the shots are communal in a sense, asking viewers to ponder their own ephemerality. Yet there is a current of aloneness crawling through the pixels that Ekberg purposely exploits. When discussing his process, he explains that he is always searching for a “simple environment” that will “underscore the aloneness of the happening”. There are no people in the frame, no hands, no faces, no traces of life. Each construction stands isolated , exploring its own relation with the camera for the second they existed alone with one another. You feel that aloneness coming through. You feel that you are the only one witnessing it, a rare sensation in our world.