Some of the works here, such as ones based on Jackie O. or Diana Vreeland, comment on so-called high society, while others, such as tributes to the performers Ethyl Eichelberger and Divine, sketch Lankton’s countercultural cosmology. “Candy Darling at Home,” from 1987, is a vision of courtly opulence, showing Lankton’s extra-long-limbed representation of the Warhol superstar in a richly textured sitting room, bejewelled and dressed head to toe in a Hermès-inspired print. A simpler, full-length portrait of the same doll, from 1987, depicts her nude but for a boa in hot pink.
Earlier pictures show a different facet of Lankton’s figurative preoccupations, a strain of work inflected by surrealism and horror. “Hermaphrodite,” from 1981, with its nightmarish blue cast, is an explicit, spread-legged, natal image of a doll, shot as if standing at the foot of a birthing bed. Photos of dolls undergoing surgery, disassembled (as in “Ballerina” and “Red Womb,” from the same year), along with a selection of some of Lankton’s smaller creations—disembodied genitals, a belly button, the spiked papier-mâché torture device of “Jesus’s Cha-Cha Heels”—almost form their own show within a show. The cluster of fraught works seems to narrate, in fragments, a journey of embattled embodiment.
Some of the works here, such as ones based on Jackie O. or Diana Vreeland, comment on so-called high society, while others, such as tributes to the performers Ethyl Eichelberger and Divine, sketch Lankton’s countercultural cosmology. “Candy Darling at Home,” from 1987, is a vision of courtly opulence, showing Lankton’s extra-long-limbed representation of the Warhol superstar in a richly textured sitting room, bejewelled and dressed head to toe in a Hermès-inspired print. A simpler, full-length portrait of the same doll, from 1987, depicts her nude but for a boa in hot pink.
Earlier pictures show a different facet of Lankton’s figurative preoccupations, a strain of work inflected by surrealism and horror. “Hermaphrodite,” from 1981, with its nightmarish blue cast, is an explicit, spread-legged, natal image of a doll, shot as if standing at the foot of a birthing bed. Photos of dolls undergoing surgery, disassembled (as in “Ballerina” and “Red Womb,” from the same year), along with a selection of some of Lankton’s smaller creations—disembodied genitals, a belly button, the spiked papier-mâché torture device of “Jesus’s Cha-Cha Heels”—almost form their own show within a show. The cluster of fraught works seems to narrate, in fragments, a journey of embattled embodiment.