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Is art eternal when the art object is not? Drawing its title from The Tempest, this exhibition is a critique of a theme repeatedly invoked in Shakespeare's sonnets, contrasting life's transitory nature and brief duration with art, which can render the life it depicts immortal and unchanging. Work in this exhibition disturbs that understanding.

Pieces by Jeppe Hein, Jordan Wolfson, and Roger Hiorns will physically change over the course of the exhibition. Projected video and light works by Martin Creed, Neil Goldberg, Anthony McCall, and Alex Schweder introduce time-based art's relation to persistence and change. Photographs by Dan Webb and a painting by Julia Schmidt document change in art objects normally thought of as fixed and eternal. Works by Morris Graves, Rachel Harrison, and Amir Zaki relate to Goldberg's video portrait of his father, preserving life and presence in the shadow of death and absence.

"An artwork that does not show change within our time-span of attending to it we tend to regard as 'object'. An artwork that does show change within our time-span of attending to it we tend to regard as 'event'. An artwork that outlives us we tend to regard as 'eternal'. What is at issue is that we ourselves are the division that cuts across what is essentially a sliding scale of time-bases. A piece of paper on the wall is as much a duration as the projection of a film."

Anthony McCall, in Anthony McCall: The Solid Light Films and Related Works. Northwestern University Press, 2005