Making Meaning / Marking Time

ECA Invitational October 2025

Cati Bestard and Michael Medeiros

ECA Gallery // October 4 – November 12, 2015

In our 20th anniversary year, ECA is considering the passage of time and the moments that have marked our organizational impact, shaping how we look forward and project our aspirations into the future for arts and culture in Easthampton.

In this spirit of marking time, we look to the work of artists Cati Bestard and Michael Medeiros, whose respective photographic and ceramic installation works animate this year’s ECA Gallery Invitational. Bestard’s photographs, which take advantage of the medium’s visual capture of a moment in time, show us something more partial and fractured. Having used outdated film from the precarious era of the financial crisis, the photo processing is incomplete and the materiality of the prints are evasive of something purely representational. The photos embody the instability wrought with time, layering eras marked with instability onto the likewise rocky present tense. In holding multiple temporalities, they undermine a sense that a singular moment can stand alone, and the common feeling that a photograph represents a scene exactly.

Medeiros’ ceramic works and installation are inward-facing, reflecting on the passing of the artist’s father—a watershed moment in life—and how the impacts of his father’s time in the Vietnam war inflected their relationship and its legacy. Ceramics, as an intensive and process-oriented medium, likewise holds time within it much like photography. Even the use of clay as material—old as dirt—carries durational meaning. It is marked by a handmade quality, imprinted by an artist literally in the moment of its making.

Time is elastic, layered, and punctuated by events both personal and shared. Bestard and Medeiros each approach these qualities through their respective media and embrace the multiplicity of temporalities embedded within them, and invite asynchronous engagements that continue to develop.

Making Meaning / Marking Time will be accompanied by events featuring performance, a time-based art form, to continue to expand on and offer additional layers to the works of the exhibition. Co-curated by Pasqualina Azzarello, Easthampton Arts & Culture Program Director, Tracey Eller, ECA Committee Chair, and E. Maude Haak-Frendscho, ECA Committee Member.