The ephemeral is the most natural form of life. A beam of light may linger for only a few minutes. A flower may bloom for only a few days. A stranger may walk beside us for only part of the journey. A relationship, too, may accompany us through only a fragment of our lives. We seem to have an instinctive habit of measuring the value of things by their permanence. What remains is considered worth preserving; what can be repeated is often taken to be more real. Yet human life is made precisely of things that cannot last. We are constantly arriving, and constantly leaving; constantly coming into possession, and constantly learning to let go. More often than not, we do not even know the exact moment when something has ended. Art, too, shares an intimate relationship with the ephemeral. A painting holds a fleeting experience upon its surface. A photograph fixes a moment that has already passed. Sculpture allows the body and material to inhabit a stretch of time together, while moving image invites us to re-enter transformations that can exist only through time. Each medium encounters the same truth in its own way: we cannot hold on to time. We can only meet it as it passes through us. For a Little While invites artists to begin from their own experiences and attend to those things that enter our lives only briefly, yet alter the way we perceive the world: a body, a space, a feeling, a relationship, a beam of light, or simply a moment that can never happen again.

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