Time Signatures
Curatorial Statement
(This part goes by fast. Don’t worry.)
Time Signatures presents Terry Hastings’ exploration of time as both structure and material. Across photography, digital composition and ceramics, Hastings creates works that do not depict singular moments but reveal the layered rhythms through which experience unfolds. His pieces operate like visual scores: sequences of color, texture, and perspective arranged with the logic of musical measures.
Now that we got that out of the way…
A time signature is a musical term that refers to how many beats are in a measure and which type of note gets the beat. It is the first thing you learn in piano lessons, which I learned at the age of four. Not because someone sat me down at a piano, but because I walked down the stairs holding an encyclopedia open to a page of music notes and asked my parents what the symbols sounded like. They bought me a piano and lessons the next week.
Then came Rhythm.
By fifth grade I was a drummer — a role reserved only for kids who already had two years of piano. I didn’t know it then, but rhythm was becoming the foundation of how I see the world. Beats, measures, subdivisions, syncopation — these weren’t just musical concepts. They were ways of organizing experience.
Peter Pan CSUN (fourth pirate from the left)
Later, in college, I chose theatre over piano because theatre was collaborative. It was rhythm in human form — actors, designers, directors, musicians, all moving in time together. I started composing musicals, building entire worlds out of measures and motifs. But theatre is slow. It takes weeks of rehearsal, months of planning, and an army of people.
So, I picked up a camera.
Swimming in the Universe
Photography was instant theatre. No lines to memorize, no blocking to refine, no lighting cues to program. Just click — and the moment was captured. Well, not just click, but close enough. It was the first time I realized I could compose rhythm visually.
Release
My collaborators were not only the models, but also the sun and the wind and the water, you can create any scene you want working with the elements.
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Singular photos were fun, but a photocollage was funner. Now, I had Time as collaborator. Suddenly I wasn’t just capturing a moment — I was breaking it apart, stretching it, repeating it, syncopating it, composing it. I could show the rhythm of looking, the rhythm of moving, the rhythm of remembering.
A Day with Kahli
And then, photography became too literal.
I wanted greater power with Time. I wanted to control not just the moment, but the conditions that shaped it — the hour, the light, the atmosphere, the focus, the emotional temperature. So, I moved into digital art.
Casual Acquaintance
Here, I brought my subjects from photography into a medium where I controlled the time of day and the depth of field. Gone were the distractions — the background noise, the accidental details, the things the camera insists on recording whether you want them or not. What remained was exactly what I, the creator, wanted you to see and feel.
Joshua Morning
Digital art gave me the ability to compose time the way I once composed music: measure by measure, beat by beat, layer by layer. I could shift the sun. I could erase the clutter. I could deepen the shadows. I could slow the moment down until it felt like memory.
Photography gave me rhythm. Digital art gave me tempo.
Neon Swimmer
It was the first medium where I could fully orchestrate the experience — not just document it.
And now, clay — time in memorial.
Clay is where I finally get to deal in history. When I work with clay, I’m creating a past in the present. I’m time traveling. The pieces I’m making now look like they were uncovered from the past — as if they’ve already lived a life before I touched them.
In clay, I’m not just composing time — I’m excavating it.
The Salton Sea Series
This is where my work becomes temporal archaeology. This is where rhythm becomes history. This is where Time Signatures becomes literal. The Salton Sea series is designed to look like pieces had been made in the 1950’s but only recently were excavated, even though I made them last week.
I’m not just composing time anymore. I’m moving through it — stepping into other eras, pulling artifacts back with me, and leaving evidence of the journey in clay, collage, and color.
And in a way, I’ve been doing this since the beginning. Ever since I walked down the stairs at age four with an encyclopedia open to a page of musical notes and asked what they sounded like, I’ve been trying to understand how time can be seen, felt, measured, and held.
