About The Life of Small Things

In his photographic interventions, Adam Ekberg presents moments both mysterious and delightful. His constructions, rendered in lavish color, are not easily decoded or resolved. A disco ball turning in the woods is simultaneously fantastic and lonely; as the beam of a flashlight bounces between mirrors in a small hallway, the scene radiates a warming light that will only ever live within the confines of the photographic frame.

Brought together for the artist’s first monograph, the images in The Life of Small Things confound expectations about what we perceive as the inevitability of the commonplace. Made over the course of the past decade, the series began as a response to Ekberg’s time as a hospice aide. Since then, his interventions have embraced a wide range of quiet surprises. Ekberg hints at the poignant beauty that can take shape, although fleetingly, when the spark of possibility hits the mundane.