Making Meaning / Marking Time
A two-person exhibition by Cati Bestard and Michael Medeiros for ECA Invitational 2025
Making Meaning / Marking Time opens Art Walk: Saturday, Oct 4, 4-7pm, and runs through November 12, 2025
ECA Gallery at Old Town Hall | 43 Main St, Easthampton, MA
Easthampton City Arts presents Making Meaning / Marking Time, a two-person exhibition by featuring Cati Bestard & Michael Medeiros for the annual ECA Gallery Invitational.
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 Having used outdated film from the precarious era of the financial crisis, the photo processing is incomplete and the materiality of the prints are evasive of something purely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 fathers 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.
Cati Bestard: Cati Bestard Rotger, originally from Mallorca, Spain, works primarily with photographic images, exploring the potential of untold narratives and nonviable materialities. She earned her MFA from Columbia University in 2018. Her work has been exhibited at Ulterior Gallery (New York), La Capella (Barcelona), ChaShaMa (New York), Times Square Space (New York), Crush Curatorial (Amagansett, NY), Ortega y Gasset Projects (Brooklyn), Museu Palau Soterra (Girona), Claustre de Santo Domingo (Mallorca, Spain), and Untitled (Miami).
She has participated in residencies at the Institute of Investigative Living with Andrea Zittel (Joshua Tree, California), Hercules Art Studio Program (New York), Art Workspace (Easthampton, MA), and Penumbra Foundation (New York). In 2023, she published her photobook Ca s’abuela, which was presented in Mallorca, Massachusetts, and New York.
Alongside her artistic practice, she maintains a curatorial practice and frequently collaborates with Dilalica, a Barcelona-based exhibition space. https://catibestard.com/
Michael Medeiros: I work at the intersection of words and artistic imagery, with a deep questioning of perceptive and conceptual experience driving my work. Primarily a poet and ceramist, I also connect photography, printmaking, fiction and narrative non-fiction into multidisciplinary personal work and community collaborations. Mindfulness and the exploration of varied methods of creative understanding and implementation are essential aspects of my practice and teaching. https://www.poesiapottery.com/