Embedded Files
Megan Cascella | Farimah Eshraghi | Meghan Murray | Samara Pearlstein
Jewett Art Gallery
Jan. 22 - Feb. 23, 2024
Time and a Half features work from four artists: Megan Cascella, Farimah Eshraghi, Meghan Murray, and Samara Pearlstein. Cascella’s prints and metal sculpture translate the patterns and textures of weaving into other media, focusing on how craft traditions translate across art practices and how the process of repetitive work functions in each mode of making. Eshraghi starts with photography and historical research, using language as both content and mark to look at the experiences of women in Iran, immigration, and the lines drawn between personal and public histories. Murray mines archives of anonymized snapshot photography to investigate the form and function of nostalgia in America through the tradition of painting. Pearlstein’s drawings explore the lines between natural and human-made marks in the landscape, and question what kinds of bodies have historically been allowed to own, explore, alter, and inhabit the land.
Different as their practices are, the experience of time, its reflections and refractions, and the evidence that its passage leaves behind run through every piece in the show. Geological time happens at a speed wholly different from the type of time we experience in our day-to-day lives, but geological processes over time mark the land in ways that can be read and interpreted later. Nostalgia is a kind of seductive, fictionalized overlay on time. Personal histories are a different sort of overlay on the historical timeline– and, of course, the histories that get written and the ones that remain hidden prove that even historical time can be subjective. The time needed to hand-craft woven fabric remains visible in the surfaces and textures of the resulting works. Profusions of dense marks, layers of carefully glazed color, weathering and wear: all stand as physical manifestations of time.
Work and time are intertwined. An employer purchases the time of a worker for a specified type of work and the worker is compensated for the expenditure of their time on this employer-determined work. The relationship of art (and craft) to work has changed through history: the artist/craftsperson has sometimes been considered a technical laborer, sometimes a force specifically operating against capitalistic industry. The term artwork implies the labor involved in the creation of the art object and the status of the artist as worker. The kind of self-directed studio work on display here– as opposed to contracted or commissioned art– happens outside of the time strictly accounted for by labor-for-wage exchange. Art practice, for artists with day jobs, necessarily happens in the time that remains after the day job is done, work that occurs beyond ‘regular’ work time. It happens in the time-and-a-half.
All four artists in this show are staff at Wellesley College: two on the Art Department’s technical side and two on the academic side. While the technical staff especially rely on skills they have developed for their own art in the course of performing their jobs, maintaining a serious independent art practice is not a job requirement for any of these workers. When we enter the time-and-a-half, we enter a realm where labor becomes divorced from capitalist exchange. Curator Helen Molesworth, in her essay for the book and 2003-04 exhibition Work Ethic, notes, “Traditional Marxist economic theory held that the production of art was radically different from production under wage labor. Wage labor, the selling of one’s time on the open market as if it were a commodity, was understood to produce a profound sense of objectification and alienation. By contrast, the creation of art was thought to have liberatory potential, coming as it does from a person’s sense of humanity.”1
Whether or not the artists in this show believe their art practice specifically ‘has liberatory potential,’ they all understand the work they engage in as part of that practice to be fundamentally different from the work they do at Wellesley—but as they are members of the Art Department, these two types of work are on some level intertwined. The distinction between time spent At Work and time spent On Work blurs; the time these artists spend on their art makes them better colleagues and mentors, and the time they spend at work, in conversation with art historians and other artists, feeds their work in the studio.
This exhibition was on view in the Jewett Art Gallery from Jan. 22 – Feb. 23, 2024.
1. Molesworth, Helen. “The Artist as Manager and Worker: Edward Kienholz.” Work Ethic, edited by Helen Molesworth, Baltimore Museum of Art, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003, p. 141.
Additional reading on artists and workers:
Boris, Eileen. Art and labor: Ruskin, Morris, and the craftsman ideal in America. Temple University Press, 1986.
Bryan-Wilson, Julia. Art workers: radical practice in the Vietnam war era. University of California Press, 2009.
Molesworth, Helen, editor. Work Ethic. Baltimore Museum of Art, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003.
Schulman, Vanessa Meikle. Work sights: the visual culture of industry in nineteenth-century America. University of Massachusetts Press, 2015.
All of these books are available in the Wellesley College Art Library (or they will be, once the Gallery Director returns them).
Select Exhibition Images
Megan Cascella studied studio art and printmaking at the University of Connecticut where she received her BFA with a Concentration in Printmaking. Her work combines her skills as a printmaker and an amateur weaver, using the language of print to explore and emphasize the aesthetics of her weavings. Her prints have been exhibited at the Center for Contemporary Printmaking, Five Points Gallery Annex, and ArtSpace Windham. She is the Printmaking Studio Technician for Dactyl Press, the Art Department’s printshop tucked away on the third floor of Pendleton West. This is her 2nd year at Wellesley.
Farimah Eshraghi studied photography at the College of Fine Arts at the University of Tehran and has an MFA in photography from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She works primarily with photography and video to address issues of gender, the body, culture, and the way social and political agendas affect personal experience. Through historical information and found imagery she connects the past to current issues and to her personal experiences growing up in a traditional society and later immigrating to the US. She is the Art Department’s Photo, Video, and New Media Technology Support Specialist and manages the PNW equipment Cage, along with other technology-focused studios and the Jewett photo darkroom. This is her 6th year at Wellesley.
Meghan Murray studied studio art at Skidmore College and has an MFA in painting from Boston University. Her representational painting practice embodies and simultaneously intervenes upon historical tradition. Her recent work is a continued investigation into intergenerational American ideals and clichés as viewed in the mid-century family photo album. Her paintings have been exhibited at Abigail Oglivy (Boston), Morgan Lehman (NYC), the Attleboro Art Museum, Boston University’s Sloane House, and virtually with newcube art through Future Fairs. She is a recipient of the 2022 Blanche E. Colman award for New England artists and was awarded second place in the 2023 Miami University Young Painters competition by juror John Yau. She is the Art Department’s Academic Administrator. This is her 2nd year at Wellesley.
Samara Pearlstein studied art and biology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and has an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University. Her work was exhibited most recently at the Till Wave Gallery in Watertown, the New England Botanic Garden at Tower Hill, and the Sargent House Museum in Gloucester. In 2020 she received a grant from the St. Botolph Club Foundation to fund the printing of her experimental graphic novel about perception (and its failures); this book is available in Wellesley’s Art Library. She is the Art Department’s Program Coordinator and Gallery Director, a summer session Drawing I instructor, the building representative for the Jewett Arts Center and Pendleton West, and the department’s (un)official event photographer. She will happily try to identify the bug you found in your office. This is her 8th year at Wellesley.
Page updated
Report abuse