PITTSBURGH, PA.- Mattress Factory presents Greer Lankton: Could It Be Love. Curated by Francis Schichtel and Jordan Weitzman, the exhibition features rarely seen photographs created by Lankton (1958–1996), newly printed for the first time from the artist's original slides, prints, and negatives. The show offers a new perspective on the pioneering trans artist whose visceral dolls were central to her explorations of a fraught relationship with the human body. Her photographs are presented alongside ephemera from the Greer Lankton Collection at Mattress Factory, and the exhibition is accompanied by a new essay from the scholar and poet S. Brook Corfman.
Greer Lankton: Could It Be Love celebrates Lankton's work as a completely original image-maker whose lens captured a world of oddballs, queer icons, and doll-like doppelgängers. Her works are located within a history of transfeminism, avant-garde performance and pop-art, while equally situated within a neo-punk canon and the Trash Trilogy of John Waters films. Part portraiture, part theatre, the images reveal Lankton's distinctive visual sensibility; blending glamour, dark humor, and artifice; characterizing the experimental spirit of the 1980s East Village scene.
"This upcoming exhibition is a spotlight on an underrecognized dimension of Greer Lankton. Nearly three decades after her death, her photographs challenge us to reconsider the scope of her practice and encounter her work anew. Mattress Factory has a deep history with Lankton, who presented her first full-scale installation, It's All About Me, Not You, at the museum in 1996, shortly before her death. This exhibition carries that relationship forward, bringing an exceptional body of work to new audiences and reaffirming Lankton's place in the history of contemporary art," says Mattress Factory Executive Director David Oresick.
Could It Be Love is produced in partnership with Light Work in Syracuse, New York. All image retouching and printing for the exhibition was completed by Light Work Lab, working from Lankton's original slides, prints, and negatives. Following its Mattress Factory presentation, the exhibition will travel to Light Work's gallery in Syracuse in 2028.
The exhibition follows upon Magic Hour Press' release of the first major monograph dedicated to Lankton's photographic work by the same name. Edited by Nan Goldin, Francis Schichtel, and Jordan Weitzman, the book draws from the Greer Lankton Archive at Mattress Factory and includes over 100 photographs by the late artist.
Greer Lankton (1958–1996) was one of the most significant artists to have taken part in the revolutionary art scene of New York City's East Village during the 1980s. Lanton grew up in Park Forest, IL, where she graduated a year early from high school to attend the Art Institute of Chicago from 1975 to 1978.
That year she moved to New York City and received her BFA from Pratt Institute in 1981. By then, Lankton had secured her reputation as a leading figure in the social ferment of NYC in the 1980s through her visceral doll sculpture, and now lesser-known performances and minimalist soft sculpture. Lankton's drawings are frequently compared to that of the expressionist Egon Schiele and her dolls and their photographic portraits, to that of surrealist Hans Bellmer.
Yet her experimental and multimedia works are located within a history of transfeminism, avant-garde performance and pop-art, while at the same time is equally situated within a neo-punk canon and the Trash Trilogy of John Waters films.
Lankton's exhibitions and performances included those at PS1, Club 57, Pyramid Club, Franklyn Furnace, Civilian Warfare Gallery, Hal Bromm and the Whitney Biennial, NYC. She also exhibited across the US and Europe, including the UK, Austria and the Venice Biennale, Italy. She exhibited her first full-scale installation artwork at the Mattress Factory Museum shortly before her untimely death in 1996.
THE CURATORS
Francis Schichtel (b. 1997) is a photographer and singer, and the Director of the Peter Hujar Foundation.
Jordan Weitzman (b. 1984, Montreal) is a photographer and publisher. He is the founder of Magic Hour Press, publishing a diverse array of books by and about artists, with a bend towards queer stories and legacies. Magic Hour began as a podcast interview series in 2016, which now has an archive of 60 interviews with photographers, editors, publishers and curators. Weitzman is largely self-taught, but attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2019. His first monograph, Participation, was published in 2022.
