“The Time Has Come” at Lynden Sculpture Garden

Mar. 29, 2024

8:41 a.m.

“The Time Has Come” at Lynden Sculpture Garden

The art world has a long and somewhat illustrious history of staff-based exhibitions. The Metropolitan Museum of Art recently opened an annual private showing of work by their security guards to the public for the first time in its 87-year history. The mega-gallery David Zwirner until recently put on a yearly show of work by their art handlers—a subtle flex signaling the size of its army of employees. And of-course the commercial gallery world regularly hands the keys to its castles to employees who mount all sorts of eccentric summer group shows while the collectors and owners are vacationing in the Hamptons. Last week the Lynden Sculpture Garden threw their hat into the ring of this history without either flexing for public or reveling in the absence of the jet-set.

“The Time Has Come: The First Lynden Staff Exhibition” is on view through June 8 and as the release offers: “grew out of our ongoing discussion about Lynden’s identity.” This is the counterintuitive value of staff-based shows: although a group of employees might not seem like a foundation for a cohesive body of work, most organizations possess a collective consciousness that attracts and shapes those in its fold. Because of this, a show of staff-made work functions like dendrochronology or a core sample of the creative center of a place. It tells us things about its inside that aren’t apparent from the surface. And in fact, we can see it from the get-go at Lynden, where we are greeted with what feels like a community of committed individuals who happen to working across media and content.

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Upon entering the main gallery, we see a brightly colored costume next to a video of a belly dance by Anna Grosch. Once inside we are immediately introduced to an assortment of pedestals, video projections, and wall pieces. On the right from the entrance is an array of carved spoons arranged at right angles on a pedestal by Jeremy Stepien. The smooth irregularity of the spoons and their variety of sourced wood species resonates with the modernist geometry-meets-organic-lushness of the gardens outside. A vitrine in the center of the space is stuffed with notes, lists, sketches, and other artifacts related to the collective Open Kitchen’s efforts to elevate awareness and identity around food and ecology. The show simmers with delicate little moments of noticing, collecting, and fashioning, such as Kim M Khaira’s gorgeous batik print fabric topped with a cluster of dried flowers and Robert Kaleta’s dried gourds and mushrooms.

Several handsome two-dimensional works fill out the show including a shimmering composite work by artist-in-residence Eneida Sanches and Emmanuel Guerra’s large graphite and gesso surrealist tableau on the far wall. But it was a project that seemed to drop from another dimension that left me vibrating for the rest of the afternoon. The north wall of the gallery offers three looped videos by Kellen “Klassic” Abston that are equal parts music, landscape painting, hallucination, and just plain sensational. With the technical help of Wes Tank and Rakim Wil, Klassic integrates sound, vision, and performance to astounding affect. Even with this unpredictable turn, I feel like I should’ve seen it coming—a reflection of Lynden’s charm: calm and welcoming on its face, but always leaving a surprise. I’ve gone to the Lynden Sculpture Garden to see art and caught frogs instead. I’ve gone to look for birds and sketched a fallen tree on the inside cover of a book. I’ve gone with lunch and slept on the grass. So coming to Lynden for an art exhibition and leaving with visions of planting cycles, ball-room dancing, hand-dyed fabric, and hip-hop dreamscapes shouldn’t be quite as amazing as it seemed that day.

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