Artist, P Staff: My name is P Staff. I’m an artist and fan of Greer Lankton.
In this moving image work from Greer, you can see that she is thinking about movement, dance, anatomy, joints, the way the body flexes. You can see the relationship to the circus, the contortionist, but also the ballet dancer. Also these hints of rebellion.
I feel like there’s this tussle, almost, between trying to abstract the body, trying to understand what freedoms might be given through abstraction, and then the violence of figuration. If I think of my soul, it’s super abstract and it’s super freeing, and then I’m like, “oh fuck, I stubbed my toe,” or someone pointing out the lipstick on your teeth. And suddenly that abstraction is sucked back in and you’re reminded of the physical world.
Art Historian, Cyle Metzger : One of the things about being alive and being human beings is that we have to contend with our own body, we have to contend with how our body feels and our own materiality on so many levels every day.
My name is Cyle Metzger.
Lankton was very invested in the capacity of her body. In her transition, that was related to gender, and this feels to me to be part of the same curiosity, to see, “well, how far can my leg go up? How flat can I make my pelvis to the ground?” But at the same time, I think it’s a real trap to think that Lankton’s work is only about transness and not about the whole of human embodiment and the ways that we bend and fold our appearance.