Opening Reception and book signing – January 25, 2-5pm
Lana Z Caplan in conversation with Ron Beinner, followed by a book signing – February 22, 2-3:30pm
Harvey Milk Photo Center
50 Scott Street, San Francisco, CA 94117
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A program of artists films that convoke elemental spirits and the power of nature in a time of human-made catastrophe—a command for light against impending darkness. Viewable online and in the Deluge transom window nightly from dusk to midnight.
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Lana Z Caplan
March 17 – April 4, 2025
Showing 3 recent videos by Lana Z Caplan
Terminal Gallery
Department of Art and Design
Austin Peay State University
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Saturday November 2nd, 2024
including ERRATA
curated by Marie-Pierre Bonniol
more information coming soon
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OTHER CINEMA
October 5, 2024
ATA Gallery, 992 Valencia St, San Francisco, CA 94110
more information
showing HOLLYWOOD, an episode from a longer work in progress based in the Oceano Dunes. I will also be discussing my new book Oceano (for seven generations) and signing copies!
In 1923, twenty-one enormous plaster sphinxes lining a path to a 30-foot-high façade of the Pharaoh’s temple were built in the Oceano Dunes for the filming of Cecil B. DeMille’s Ten Commandments, a seminal early Hollywood blockbuster. After filming, DeMille dug a trench and buried the whole set in the sand dunes, where it remained for almost 100 years until recent excavations. Hollywood uses found footage from the media and YouTube to tell this remarkable media story.
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Artist Talk and Book Signing with Lana Z Caplan
June 21st, 2024 – 6:30pm – 8pm
more information
Griffin Museum of Photography
67 Shore Road, Winchester, Ma 01890
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Saturday April 27, 2024, 10:30am
Lana Z Caplan will be presenting her project Oceano (for seven generations) and signing books.
More information and registration
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A large selection of images from Oceano (for seven generations) will be part of the annual exhibition series Behind the Lens. Curated by RI Center for Photographic Arts director David DeMelim, this series started in 2018 as a celebration of Women’s History month. Read more from the curator and about the work in the show.
Lana Z Caplan will be giving a talk in the gallery and signing copies of her new book Oceano (for seven generations) on February 17th, 2pm EST. The talk will be available on Zoom – Register here
Zoom panel with the artists – March 7, 7pm EST. Register here
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published by Kehrer Verlag
ORDER NOW!
Oceano is portrait of the Oceano Dunes, a telling of their many stories: ATV riders and their RV village, the Chumash of the past and present, the Dunites (artists, poets, astrologers, mystics and hermits living in the dunes primarily in the 1920’s-40’s), the recently unearthed plaster sphinx from Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 Ten Commandments movie set, and a reimaging of Edward Weston’s modernist dune photographs.
Contributing essays by yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash Tribal Chair Mona Olivas Tucker with her son Matthew Goldman, and by Hanna Rose Shell, Associate Professor of Critical and Curatorial studies, and Director of the Stan Brakhage Center for Media Arts in Boulder, Colorado.
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June 2, 18h30
Cinéma Ermitage, Belgium
programmed by Damien Truchot
En collaboration avec le Collectif Jeune Cinéma
Stefano Miraglia (Collectif Jeune Cinéma)
Patches of Snow in July & Les Bêtes du sud sauvage
more information
Theme for this 12th edition of the festival is “Le Climat”
The climate demands our attention, indeed makes us worry, but it would be arrogant to imagine that we are the first to entertain such concerns, which were already clearly present with our forebears.
Weather and climate are two sides of the same coin. Meteorology refers to the daily experience of events such as wind, rain, and heat, whereas the climate considers the weather over much longer durations. The French language uses the same word, le temps, to designate both the weather and the passage of time. From this perspective, deep time, historical time, is inherent in the very notion of climate. https://www.festivaldelhistoiredelart.fr/
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A monograph by Lana Z Caplan
press release
About the Book
-136 pages, 70 b/w and color images, 30x24cm/11.8×9.5″
-Contributing essay by yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash Tribal Chair Mona Olivas Tucker and son Matthew Goldman
-Contributing essay by Hanna Rose Shell, Associate Professor of Critical and Curatorial studies, and Director of the Stan Brakhage Center for Media Arts in Boulder, Colorado.
-Published by Kehrer Verlag
Lana Z Caplan spent seven years researching and collaborating with the communities of Oceano, California and yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash Tribal leadership, to produce a conceptual collection of histories from the Oceano Dunes. These are the dunes of Weston’s modernist photographs; of Cecil B. DeMille’s recently excavated and restored sphinxes from his 1923 Ten Commandments movie set, buried in the sand after filming; of the nearly lost Northern Chumash tribe; of the Dunites – the artists, poets, nudists, and mystics squatting in dune shacks in the 1920’s-40’s – who hosted Weston during his shooting trips; and of the 1.5 million ATV riders who visit each year, inciting a decades-long legal battle with nearby residents over air quality.
Oceano (for seven generations) tells a conceptual story of place and interrogates photographic conventions regarding landscape and representation. Black and white landscapes are flipped into negatives, confusing the notion of photographic truth and and challenging the male-dominated history of the genre. Portraits are co-constructed performative gestures rather than documents. Multiple modalities of image making references Modernists, New Topographics, ethnographic typologies, and advertising. Ultimately, Oceano questions legacies of colonization, photographic history, utopian ideologies, the politics of land use, and the future for the politically charged and environmentally threatened Oceano Dunes.
Recent/Upcoming events:
Recent Reviews/Press:
FRAMES
Lenscratch
About Photography
Photobook Journal
Mediterraneo Fotografia
13th Annual Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival
Hawick, Scottish Boarders
27 – 30 April 2023
A Thousand Sighs
UK Premiere
Program:
TAKE ARMS AGAINST A SEA
From ocean to moon, six films wrestle with nothing less than life, death and birth and self-expression
10.00am, Friday 28 April
https://alchemyfilmandarts.org.uk/festival/
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OCEANO
a monograph of images and texts will be available in fall 2023, published by Kehrer Verlag
I look to the white garden of the dunes.
The vast shadow-suckled sand.
Where the colors flash and never issue
But flow through hidden veinage;
I am naked to the sun.
I let the sun print on me as on the dunes.
With great passion of surrender, I have peace.
-Hugo Seeling (Dunite Poet) excerpt from L., published in Wheel of Fire, Round Table Book Co, Oceano, 1936
While these Dunes often appear as a blank, shifting landscape, Oceano weaves rich histories spanning over 12,000 years – from the expunged Native American inhabitants to the present-day ATV riders – to consider the current politically charged landscape of the Oceano Dunes. These are the dunes of the Chumash, nearly erased by the Spanish Missionaries; the dunes of Cecil B. DeMille’s ancient Egyptian The Ten Commandments movie set, buried in the sand in 1923 and currently being unearthed; the dunes of the Dunites – the artists, poets, nudists, and mystics living in the dunes in the interwar period; the dunes of Edward Weston and Ansel Adams’ modernist perfection; and the dunes of the current day Dunites – the ATV, motorcycle, and dune buggy riders and their RV village.
November 23-27, 2022
including Autopoiesis, Nov 26, 19:00
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October 20-30
Victoria, BC and online
International Premiere of A Thousand Sighs
details
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A Thousand Sighs, 6:50, 4K video, 2022
“Lana Z Caplan’s A Thousand Sighs illustrates the intensity and borderline otherworldly joy experienced by the filmmaker through pregnancy during the pandemic. Psychedelic colours and upbeat music are paired with ultrasounds and images of a dancing, pregnant body to convey the range of conflicting emotions felt during that period.” Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival
BI-ANNUAL FESTIVAL
FOR ART WITH SOUND
Provinciaal Domein Dommelhof, Belgium
October 21-23, 2022
Errata will be presented with Wasser by Marie-Pierre Bonniol
more information
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Millennium Film Workshop
NYC
July 23-24, 2022
curated by Alex Faoro
including Maelstroms
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June 16 – August 20, 2022
Everson Museum Plaza
401 Harrison Street, Syracuse, NY
No Emoji for Ennui (group exhibition)
Lana Z Caplan
Ross Meckfessel
Alison Nguyen
Matt Whitman
Kite: Makȟóčheowápi Akézaptaŋ (Fifteen Maps)
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OTHER CINEMA, SF
April 23, 2022
HODO + SCOTT + WATTS TOWERS +
OC presents the first of a dual-citizenship double-header locus-focused on the Southwest of the continent, with a compelling cadre of makers from Mexico as well as an audio-visual feast of provocative shorts from the North. Greg Berger‘s outrageous Joe T Hodo project demonstrates how a SF expat activist has managed to construct a potent satirical character on the margins of contemporary Mexican politics, Charles Fairbanks/Saul Kak‘s Echoes of the Volcano surveys the Oaxacan soundscape, and the Postcommodity Collective bisects the border wall with beautiful balloons! Whereas the psycho-politics of the LA area, layered in time and grounded on Simon Rodia‘s landmark sculpture hand-wrought in Watts, is echoed in Noah Purifoy‘s junk-art-park in the desert of Joshua Tree and reverberates through the mesmerizing Cali-fire reveries of San Luis Obispo‘s Lana Z Caplan. PLUS the legendary Matt Wolf/Guadalupe Rosales coverage of Latinx resistance to neighborhood gentrification in Boyle Heights, Georg Koszulinski‘s rhapsodic on-the-road collage-essay Continental Drifts, and Jake Scott‘s transformative farewell-to-Frisco hybrid performance.
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Program 12: Drift
April 22, 2022
Municipal Cineteca of Durango, Mexico
Mexico City
May 29 – June 29 – Streaming on Mexican Institute of Cinematography’s FILMINLATINO
Including A Jurist for Nothing
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MARCH 31 – APRIL 2, 2022
including A Jurist for Nothing
THURSDAY, MARCH 31 8:00PM
PROGRAM 1: Light Leak
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March 24-27, 2022
including A Jurist for Nothing, Autopoiesis and Patches of Snow in July
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January 27 – March 26, 2022
Thursday – Saturday, dusk – 11pm
Everson Museum of Art Plaza
401 Harrison Street
Plaza Projection Schedule
Jan. 27-Feb 5: Lana Z Caplan, Autopoiesis
Feb. 10-19: Ross Meckfessel, Estuary
Feb 24-March 5: Alison Nguyen, My Favorite Software Is Being Here
March 10-19: Matt Whitman, CAN’T ANSWER YOU ANYMORE (ON FACES) & HOW MUCH LONGER
March 24-26: combined loop
In-person Screening
Thursday | February 24 | 6:30 p.m.
Screening + Q&A
Thursday, March 10 | 6:30 p.m. EST
Streaming Online
About the Program
No Emoji for Ennui is a group show featuring the work of Lana Z Caplan, Ross Meckfessel, Alison Nguyen, and Matt Whitman that explores the difficult-to-define emotional tenor of our time—one that often leaves us overstimulated and underwhelmed at the same time it demands endless positivity. The seductive surface of the touchscreen shatters and the polygon meshes underlying our shared social reality peek out from under the digital skin.
What does it feel like to be a person in a world in which our sense of self has been thoroughly disoriented by technological entanglement and co-opted by neoliberal capital?
By turns unsettling, contemplative, humorous, and filled with existential dread, the resulting show is a collective selfie of who and what we are now.
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Feb. 24th-27th, 2022
Festival screenings at Tempus Projects and at FLEX HQ’s outdoor cinema
Including Autopoiesis
Thursday February 24th, 8pm EST
Full schedule here: FLEX ’22 Schedule at a Glance
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November 20-21, 2021
Videodrome 2 and SOMA
Including Autopoiesis
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Subway Sleepers from Beijing featured on Photography of China,
the world’s leading online platform for contemporary Chinese photography.
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including ERRATA
June 18, 2021, 18h30
Mains d’oeuvre
AMAPuces, 1 Rue Charles Garnier, 93400 Saint-Ouen, France
website
facebook event page
May 1-10, 2021
A Jurist for Nothing has been selected to participate in the MuVi International Award of the 67th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, which will be screening from 1 to 4 May 2021.
http://www.kurzfilmtage.de/
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Mexico City, Winter 2020-21
Including Autopoiesis
Streaming online and showing in cultural venues across Mexico City
Online: Friday, January 15, 2021 at 5:00 p.m. (CDMX time)
Program: Hologram Film projection # 7 / Program: Hologram
Stream: Facebook live
Filmmakers Program: Hologram
1. Federica Foglia-04/19/1968 (Italy)
2. Philippos Kappa – C wraps 9 (Greece)
3. Juana Robles – And a porcelain cat (Ireland)
4. Federica Leaf – Toad, Leaf, Grass, Rock (Italy)
5. Ildefonso Mercadillo – UP (Mexico)
6. Johannes Binotto – Prohibited Reproduction (Suiza)
7. ISABEL PEREZ OF THE THUMBER, JOSE CRUZIO – [SELF] INSERTIONS (Portugal)
8. Antonio Arango Vazquez – Untitled, Subtitled (Mexico)
9. Lana Z Caplan – Autopoiesis (USA)
10. Maxim Tatarintsev / +- (Russia)
November 9-22, 2020
Including Autopoiesis – Saturday November 14 at 9pm
Shorts Program 5 – Virtual Screening
live Q&A after screening
Now approaching its twenty-seventh year, CUFF is officially the LONGEST RUNNING UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL IN THE WORLD. The fest is an internationally recognized program that screens documentary, experimental, avant-garde and cult cinema, and showcases films that explore new approaches to established practices.
https://cuff.org/
@chicagoundergroundfilmfest
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November 11 – 15, 2020
Festival World Premiere
A Jurist for Nothing
November 15, 9pm EST
video by Lana Z Caplan, sound by A.F. Jones
A Jurist for Nothing available from Gertrude Tapes
https://www.moviate.org/
Program here
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