"The Delusion of Grandeur," sculpted by Phoebe Cummings, on view at the Museum of Arts and Design through August 12, 2012. (Photo: Ed Watkins)

Every single day our factories emit smoke, our dryers collect lint, and our skin cells fall onto the floor. We brush these particulates aside, deeming our detritus inconsequential. In MAD Museum‘s current show, Swept Away: Dust, Ashes, and Dirt in Contemporary Art and Design, the most ignored pieces of our surroundings become artistic media. What is unique about dust, ashes, and dirt is that they make it impossible to create art that can be kept forever. Artists tend to make works that are immutable. Against our instincts, Swept Away rejects this tendency towards permanence in art and instead embraces the ephemeral.

One of the most perplexing works is Ashes to Ashes, in which Antonio Riello had burned his personal collection of favorite books and displays the ashes in labeled glass vessels. The artist is horrified by book-burning, and the viewers probably are as well. The piece shows us how easily some of humanity’s greatest accomplishments can be obliterated. Paradoxically, he destroyed the books but then treated their ashes as precious. The title calls to mind the way we keep the ashes of cremated loved ones, holding onto these last vestiges even though the person they came from is long gone.

The exhibition centers on Phoebe Cummings’ The Delusion of Grandeur (pictured above), a clay sculpture of a pot of flowers. Cummings directly challenges this by the simple choice to not fire the clay: just as in a real plant, the flowers and leaves fall off over time. Making her sculpture transient thus allowed it to become more realistic. It might bother people that the art is falling apart, but this discomfort is what is so interesting about the piece. My friend received a flower for Valentine’s Day and has tried to preserve it ever since. Still, her flower will one day be gone. (And everything that ever lived will eventually cease to exist.) Cummings’ piece suggests that we are downright deluded in these efforts to make our world static.

In the same way that looking up at the stars reminds us of how tiny we are in the vastness of space, Swept Away reminds us of how fleeting we are is in the vastness of time. If you want to challenge your ideas about art and perhaps your own existence, Swept Away is a must-see.