The Brooklyn Rail

In a corner of the gallery, a dialogue is formed between two works: one, a papier-mâché simulacra of a public payphone—the details exactingly realized—installed at a height appropriate for use, and the other, a vintage black-and-white photograph depicting several women, including one languidly leaning in, talking on a similar telephone. These two works, Payphone, (2024), and Mademoiselle, 1968 (1968), by Bernie Kaminski and Gösta Peterson respectively, appear as artifacts from a retreating world when viewed together. While as a public amenity the payphone has essentially vanished, it remains an instantly recognizable, fixed marker of time and place; their removal noted now not for the loss of calling capacity, but for the missing resonance of their amassed associations.

This is not an exotic phenomenon, the once commonplace now in retreat. Every era sees the seemingly intrinsic supplanted by the unfamiliar, and whether by advancing technological or cultural evolution, the new tends to replace the old. If contemporaneity—and our presence among it—is read as the result of sustained cultural momentum yielded by an organic march through time, the algorithmic taxonomy our world configures itself through would seem an aberration. A question that this raises: how does the present fade, through the simple shifting aesthetic of the age, or perhaps technological expediency? Presence is difficult to capture; it can be impossible to know your own time in the midst of it, and disentangling its specifics later rarely offers the answers hoped for.

This interchange—of currency and obsolescence, of history and its apprehension—is a curatorial impetus in LANDLINE, a group exhibition presented at Turn. Four artists spanning three distinct generations are featured, all creating works engaging with a uniquely analog passage of time that is made more apparent in our current moment when notions of stability are being forever refigured amid endless digital dissipation. While all of the works in the show function in various ways as metaphors for losses, both past and ongoing, none succumb to an insular, crushing sentimentality, but instead serve as engines of memory. Alongside the work of Kaminski and Peterson, two painters are represented. Karyn Lyons and Leonard Baby create images that toy with representational assumption by exploring the hypothetical spaces of mythic pasts. All of these artists have produced works that explore the things of which the passing of time can rob us through no traceable fault. In the appropriately intimate gallery space, LANDLINE offers a vigil of sorts to a tempo at times recognizable, a notable presence, summoning cadences of the past even in their absence.

While many of Kaminski’s works transform once common products into unlikely consumerist memento mori, the selection of Peterson’s photographs, originally made as magazine commissions in the 60s and 70s, form their own iconography of loss, capturing the transitory designs of an industry prefaced upon the promotion of a never ending currency. Styles can have the briefest of half-lives, only rarely reaching iconic status, and as so many legendary designs were produced at couture scales, they are primarily known through the photographs created to promote them. Fashion photography invariably yields a lexicon of the contemporary, chronicling a moment that will inevitably outlast the clothes themselves, recording them as more than timely silhouettes, but as the cut of the era itself.

As a gesture, Tennis Racquet - Prince Classic (2024), a recreation of a vintage wooden tennis racket complete with its branded protective vinyl cover, is more than mere acquiescence of a new sense of objecthood. With its potent historical particularity and coherence of craft, Kaminski’s racquet circumscribes a longing for material certainty. Such a calibrated specificity is also found in Peterson’s Mademoiselle, 1976 (1976), in which two women in sundresses and hats are posed in a bathroom, one lounging against a sink, the other leaning back upon a toilet, seemingly exhausted, resignedly looking into a mirror held by a young girl. The wares are surely being advertised, but the summoning of a world of untroubled anomie—a finely structured recreation of an vague idealized past—sells with the shoot itself comfortably occupying a space between performance and product.

Leonard Baby’s paintings are in part appropriated from a broad range of commercial sources, including arthouse film stills, and possess the elegiac color palette yielded by the formulations of mid-century celluloid. In I Won't Wait Up For You Anymore So You Can Ask Me If Something's Wrong (2025) a young man rests his head upon a mid-century desk while a portable phonograph plays. Is this image (origins undisclosed) a beginning or an ending? Rendered with the narrative acumen of a Dutch Vanitas painting, Baby’s images remain opaque, reveling in and confounding any notion of placid stasis to be offered by representations of history, fictional or otherwise.

The scenes of adolescent drama that Karyn Lyons’s paintings depict similarly mine the past. Drawn partly from her own memories, but also broader teenage archetypes, Lyons creates amalgamated portrayals of childhood that read as dreams of surrealist logic and heavy symbolism, hinting at the confusions and latent desires inherent to all comings of age. Lyons’s images are rendered with at times provisional brushwork, creating a map of assembly through the visibility of the structuring strokes. In their careful construction, these scenes simultaneously complicate adolescence as they distill it, representing the probable and the possible in place of the precise. In The Panglossian (2025) a nude young woman kneels with her back to the viewer on an unmade canopy bed in a strikingly traditional bedroom with an array of magazine pin-ups arranged around her. Is this captured moment one of sexual awakening, or perhaps its darker inverse? Lyons provides only a fragment of a larger narrative of curiosity seized, its ultimate vector unknown.

As a conceptual metaphor, the landline excels. It can be difficult to imagine how the stranded copper linkage that once connected every home and business was once a revolutionary, distance leveling technology, or to remember the codified anonymity the system carried via the mystery of every call. With each ring, blind to the identity of the caller, the receiver was lifted in an act of faith unimaginable to the patterned intelligence that guides an algorithm. In such a deliberate form of connectivity, a stake is being taken, active choices made. The pull of seemingly simpler times is a uniquely compelling force and this analog certainty would seem a refuge from the digital ambivalence of the shifting eddies of divisional calculations compelling each click and scroll. When assessing the formulations of the past, we invariably ask what it is we want of them. In the diligent curation of LANDLINE, judgment is not being passed, but measures are made. The fit and finish of the memories summoned is familiar, but this nostalgia is Janus-faced, reliving past abandonments while questioning coming attachments that retreat into the halcyon as the acknowledged turbulence of the future intensifies.