Streaming live with filmmaker Q&As
including Autopoiesis
Program 5, Saturday Sept. 12, 4:30pm EST
https://www.thatonefilmfestival.com/comp-program-5
https://www.thatonefilmfestival.com/
–
Gallery NAGA
July 17 – September 4, 2020
including new photographs from the series Shed on Passive Sands
including Maelstroms
LIVE STREAM: Thursday, August 6th, at 7pm EST
https://withfriends.co/event/4769408
http://www.rhizomedc.org/
August 1-31, 2020
Online and Offline
areacodeartfair.com
@areacodeartfair
Area Code Drive In Digital Showcase
Friday August 14, 8:30-10pm
Salem State’s O’Keefe Sports Complex
Including Lana Z Caplan’s film play and repeat.
Juried by Leonie Bradbury and presented in partnership with LuminArtz, works in the Video and Digital-Art section of the fair will be screened for drive-in viewing events.
IAM – Institut für Alles Mögliche Berlin – 09 July – 23 August 2020
Program 7 – Switching the Change
Curated by Wilfried Agricola de Cologne
Screening with Program 1 each Sunday, July 9-August 23, 14h-20h
Uri Kloss (Israel) – Word, 2017, 1:29
Fran Orallo (Spain) – Death Dance, 2017, 1:00
James Murphy (Ireland) – Moving Water, 2019, 1:59
Zlatko Cosic (Bosnia) – Even The Birds Know It, 2017, 2:55
Alan Sondhein (USA) – American Life, 2018, 6:03
Dmitry Kmelnitsky (USA) – URTH LING, 2019, 3:43
Brit Bunkley (New Zealand) – Pillard of Cloud, 2016, 4:00
Oleg Kharch (Ukraine) – Fakemet, 2019, 3:46
Lana Z Caplan (USA) – Canaries in the Mine, 2015, 8:19
Kristina Frank /Mervi Kekarainen (Sweden) – 2Rabbits in Purgatorio, 2019, 05:11
Arie Sigal & Ben-David Sigal (Israel) – Perlite, 2018, 4:17
Marcha Schagen (NL) – Melt Less CO2, 2019, 3:48
Adrien Gaumé (France) – Dry by innocence, 2018, 4’53”
Kate Walker (USA) – Cloudship, 2018, 14:33
Xia Han (China) – The Gift, 2019, 14: 23
Michael Carmody & Elissa Goodrich (Australia) – Common Time, 2018, 12:23
Boris Marinin (Israel) – Greenhouse, 2019, 3:19
Ausin Sainz (Spain) – Today, 2019, 5:00
Susanne Wiegner (Germany) – Sunrise, 2019, 5: 46
Gabriele Stellbaum (Germany) – Shame, 2019, 1:11
http://retro.newmediafest.org/wow-jubilee-2020-vii/
_
Featuring Maelstroms
Now streaming: https://www.labocine.com/issues/unequal-states
About Unequal States
Stories of the continued struggle against oppression through movements, resistance, and solidarity are often documented and presented in many forms as acts of resistance themselves. In these stories, the notion of “inequality” draws together different worlds, cultures, and dimensions/scales (micro/macro). From animations to documentaries, these films shed light on the pervasiveness of this inequality on all fronts by exploring social, scientific, and political perspectives in our fight against racism, injustice, and inequality.
June 11, 2020
The photographic series Postcards from the Hanging: Sites of Public Execution was featured on the prominent Fine Art Photography Daily website Lenscratch.com.
“Trauma and horrific histories are held in landscapes in every corner of the globe. For the past twenty years photographer, filmmaker, and educator Lana Z Caplan has been documenting sites of public killings in her project, Postcards from the Hanging: Sites of Public Execution. She shares some stunning statistics in her statement, “The United States is one of only 20 countries in the world that continues to employ state sanctioned killing. In 2019 we ranked 6th in the world in the number of executions following (in order) China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Egypt (execution totals not known for Vietnam, North Korea, and Syria).” Her thoughtful examination of why our country continues to allow the death penalty adds another layer to its history of pain and suffering.” Lenscratch.com
The Moving Image Catalog
A platform for artists’ moving image.
Curated by Stefano Miraglia & guests.
Since 2016.
Featuring Lana Z Caplan’s Patches of Snow in July
available with French subtitles, courtesy of Collectif Jeune Cinéma
Launching June 10, 2020
A Jurist for Nothing is the new full length LP by A.F. Jones released on Gertrude Tapes
Watch video here
Listen to the full album here
Some press:
Tone Glow – Review
Ruix Zine – Review
Best Experimental Music on Bandcamp April 2020
Magnet Magazine – Review
“During covid19 crisis (and even after), some films from our distribution catalogue are available to watch in their entirety. Enjoy, and stay safe ! www.cjcinema.org”
Now Streaming full films (with french subtitles):
ERRATA and PATCHES OF SNOW IN JULY
Watch 300 films distributed by Collectif Jeune Cinema here
Cabin Fever Playlist as of April25-340pm
Including links to full length versions of 2 films:
ERRATA
20:40 min, 2017 (Meditative and Calming playlist)
Sound by Alan F. Jones and Lana Z Caplan
Rhythms of the mundane become a meditation on leisure, work, and time. As the visual cycle repeats – passengers load, unload, reload, boats arrive, depart, arrive – the reading of the Italian ferryboat schedule – town names, times, and departures – morphs from announcement to chant, boats transform, deconstruct, and twist into a mindscape, rendering the unseen, the errata, seen.
ROAR
3:30, 2007 (Animals playlist)
Footage from the 1933 film “The Big Cage” stripped of sound and re-edited onto clear leader followed by the removed optical soundtrack, also affixed to clear leader. Each strip of sound acts as a character, mimicking the actions in the film.
Cabin Fever Playlist featured on:
The Black Maria Virtual Film Festival in partnership with the Hoboken Historical Museum presents over 100 award-winning short films completely free of charge – no strings attached – for as long as the pandemic lasts.
Watch play and repeat (Director’s Choice Prize 2015 Festival) and many other films here
curated by Lili White
Now streaming archived programs online:
Show 20: Politcal Restings, TRT 25:34
including IN RUINS, WE REBUILD WITH MEMORIES BURIED IN THE FOUNDATION
Show 18: Crystal Umbrellas, TRT 37:00
including play and repeat
Also screening:
Q&A with Lana Z Caplan & Rebekkah Heidenberg
from February 28th, 2018 at Anthology Film Archives, NYC
Autopoiesis will be screened twice:
– Thursday the 16th of April at 19:00
– Sunday the 19th of April at 15:00
POSTPONED
VARSITY THEATER
123 E Franklin St
Chapel Hill, NC 27514
Program 6: Autopoiesis
March 6, 9pm
http://www.cosmicraysfilmfest.com/
OVER AND OUT
THREE YEARS OF CINEMATIC RESISTANCE
including #YouAreASystem, aka Autopoiesis
Experimental Response Cinema presents OVER AND OUT, its third celebration of resistance to the policies of United States president #45! Cathartic as well as a call to action, this screening of short films will address the current political landscape in ways both playful and incisive. With it, we affirm creativity as a vital and needed clapback to lies, greed, bigotry and ignorance.
You’ll laugh
you’ll cry
you’ll vote him OUT November 3rd…
Image: KNEE JERK, Kerry Laitala and students in her Advanced Processing Workshop at the San Francisco Art Institute
January 17-19, 2020
Clinton Street Theater
2522 SE Clinton Street
Portland, OR 97202
Including Autopoiesis and Patches of Snow in July
Screening Sunday January 19, 2:45pm
Space Time is happy to present an evening of contemporary, experimental Science Fiction videos.
Screening of works by James Fotopoulos, Lana Z Caplan, and Michael Trigilio
January 17th, 2020
at Bread & Salt
1955 Julian Ave., San Diego, CA 92113
Doors: 7:30pm, Screening: 8pm
Dignity, James Fotopoulos, (2012, 82 min.)
Autopoiesis, Lana Z Caplan, (2019, 7:20 min.)
Glimmer Exodus Overture, Michael Trigilio, (2019, 12:31 min.)
January 16-19, 2020
Including Lana Z Caplan’s Autopoiesis in the special program “Digital Detox”.
Friday 17th of January 2020 at 5:30 p.m.
“For over 30 years, the Festival has been devoted to crossing the border between cinema and media art with an adventurous international programme comprising films, workshops, Expanded Media exhibition and performances for people of all ages. The Festival’s core are the international competitions for short film, Media in Space and Network Culture – flanked by a comprehensive programme. This year’s thematic focus is “Absence”. The Festival edition is located at the interface between a media-dominated society in all its facets and all of the things falling through or getting blurred by the grid of such a society: what is not said or depicted, the things pushed aside or rejected. We are longing for absence and its traces. Like a test strip, our Festival delves into the big house of absence – placing it at the macro focus.” https://filmwinter.de/en
December 22nd and February 5th 2020
Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh
Including Lana Z Caplan’s Maelstroms and Patches of Snow in July
OPEN SSA+VAS, is presented in partnership with Visual Arts Scotland and will be the largest exhibition of contemporary art and craft to be held in Scotland this year giving an audience of over 30,000 people the opportunity to discover and enjoy artworks across all mediums.
http://cutlog.co.uk/
New Museum of Networked Art & The Wake Up! Memorial
Launching 25 December 2019
curated by Agricola de Cologne, artvideoKOELN
Lana Z Caplan’s Canaries in the Mine is included in the collection “Wake-up – Climate Change!”, part of The Wake up! Memorial project.
“NewMediaFest 2020 – an event structure to take place in an exchange between virtual and physical space – starting on 25 December 2019 in Ethiopia – running until 31 December 2020 – will honour and include all artists, curators and other cultural instances like festivals, museum , galleries etc which were collaborating with Agricola de Cologne during the past 20 years since 2000 – in the basic program online – there will be at least 12 physical venues- each month another one in another country presenting an individual Jubilee program – to be complemented by monthly features online in video, netart and soundart.” http://retro.newmediafest.org/
View the videos here: http://wake-up.engad.org/
Fri., Dec. 6, 2019
at the Small World Music Centre
180 Shaw St, Toronto, ON
Lost and Found in Late Capitalism, Curatorial Statement:
In recent years, with the election of right-wing and fascist politicians around the world, the link between fascism and capitalism has become impossible to ignore. As profit overtakes happiness as the endeavour of humanity and austerity becomes the way of the land, the citizens of the modern nation have no choice but to go with the pack or get trampled in the process. Of course, since it was left to fester for so long, capitalism has reached its inevitable zenith, reaching that time that we have been warned about for decades, the age of late capitalism. Existing somewhere between apocalypse and parody, the age of late capitalism has brought about dystopian ideals presented to its subjects as standard societal practices. No longer will people fight for their own rights, because their rights have been established as unrealistic, their fighting as criminal. Late capitalism is the current state of affairs. It cannot be stopped, unless people wake up to it, become aware of it. Perhaps the response from the art world could help that occur.
That is the idealistic background for Pleasure Dome’s Lost and Found in Late Capitalism, a response to this stage of late capitalism by using its own products. While capitalism continues to destroy our environment, wage wars on our people, and destroy our social fabric, this program will attempt to speak truth to power by speaking power’s language. This program consists of a series of short videos constructed from found footage, coming from a variety of formats, sources and levels of legality. These videos use footage from Hollywood films, business promotional videos, public domain artefacts and military footage to tell stories of life under the thumb of capitalism. It is through this re-appropriation of the products of capitalism that today’s artists can attempt to come to terms with the struggle of living under an unquestionable dictatorial system.
Beyond Human, Pete Burkeet (Ohio, USA), 2018.
Mad as Hell, Emily Pelstring (Kingston, ON, CND) and Meg Remy (Toronto, ON, CND), 2017.
Gone Sale, Matt Meindl (USA), 2018.
Public Domain, Jason Britski (SK,CND), 2018.
A Feverish Fascination, Imogen Clendinning, (Windsor, ON, CND), 2018.
Music of Desire, Kristin Reeves (KY, USA), 2016.
Painting with the Man, Freya Björg Olafson (Toronto, ON, CND), 2017.
What is an Object, Stephanie Deumer (NY, USA) 2015.
Maelstroms, Lana Z Caplan (CA, USA), 2015.
Flat Pyramid, Kevin Doherty (NY, USA), 2017.
Lost and Found in Late Capitalism
including Lana Z Caplan’s play and repeat
‘Connect’ Video arts program
November 22nd, 2019
at the In Absentia Digital Pavilion
Cineporto Foggia, Italy
sponsored by Apulia Film Commission
https://www.facebook.com/InAbsentiaDigitalPavilion/
including Lana Z Caplan’s Patches of Snow in July and Maelstroms
program details here
more information: http://www.mobius.org/aevents/2019/10/31/manifest-dismantling-boston-cyberarts
facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/1061362700861472
MEDIA ARCHEOLOGY 1
curated by the magical Craig Baldwin
Other Cinema
@ ATA Gallery
992 Valencia St, San Francisco
November 2, 2019
MEDIA ARCHEOLOGY 1
SCOTT STARK + TOMMY BECKER + BILL BAIRD + LANA Z CAPLAN +
A Live A-V luv-fest fer sure, with distinctive, daring demonstrations of creative expression from four of Cali’s leading media-artists! Prodigal son Scott Stark proffers a para-cinema set featuring the premiere of CLYPPS and his in-house 35mm scope projector, while twinkling SLO satellite Lana Z Caplan orbits back with the NorCal launch of her 35mm piece Apollonian Light and her Autopoiesis short. SF stalwart Tommy Becker sets up screen-left with the debut of his Side Two of Tape Number One–music and poetry exploring our entangled relations with auto-mobile machines. AND here’s the unveiling of The Cube by ex-Austinite Bill Baird–musical performance-art inside a projection-mapped tent! PLUS a sprinkling of cine/sonic tricks by Ryan Worsley, Bruce Haack, Brett Ingram, et al. Dizzying documentation of Brown/Gruffat’s Unsettling Texas film–performance follows Russ Forster‘s theremin busking.
“Other Cinema is a long-standing bastion of experimental film, video, and performance in San Francisco’s Mission District. We are inspired and sustained by the ongoing practice of fine-art filmmaking, as well as engaged essay and documentary forms. But OC also embraces marginalized genres like “orphan” industrial films, home movies, ethnography, and exploitation, as media-archeological core-samples, and blows against consensus reality and the sterility of museum culture.” http://www.othercinema.com/
We are delighted to welcome multimedia artist Lana Z Caplan to present a Canyon Cinema Salon screening at 16 Sherman Street in San Francisco. Caplan has curated a program that elegantly weaves films from Canyon’s deep catalog along with her poignant and visually rich work.
“Chosen from subconscious memories and deep influences, the films in this program relate to the ideas and approaches that I have been wrestling with in my own work: harmony and disharmony with the rhythms and gifts of earth — persuasive and abusive use of media — ritual, ceremony, mysticism — and the fleeting preciousness of it all. ” – Lana Z Caplan
As always, this event is free and open to the public, with refreshments served beginning at 7:00 and the doors closed for the start of the show at 7:30. An informal conversation with the filmmaker will follow the screening.
Program includes:
Kalendar by Naomi Uman (2008, 12 min, 16mm)
A Depression in the Bay of Bengal by Mark Lapore (1996, 28 min, 16mm)
My Name is Oona by Gunvor Nelson (1969, 10 min, 16mm)
HedonHeathen 1 by Lana Z Caplan (2013, 2 min, HD)
Aspect by Emily Richardson (2004, 9 min, 16mm)
Patches of Snow in July by Lana Z Caplan (2017, 8 min, HD)
http://canyoncinema.com/about/canyon-cinema-salon/1112019-a-salon-with-lana-z-caplan/
16 Sherman Street, SF, CA
Facebook Event
Transient Visions Festival of the Moving Image
October 18 – 19, 2019
including Autopoiesis
Spool Contemporary Art Space
138 Baldwin Street
Johnson City, NY 13790
United States
http://www.transientvisions.org/
22nd Annual Festival
Victoria, BC, Canada
October 16 – 26, 2019
including Autopoiesis
October 23, 6-9pm
Reeves Theater
University of Tampa
At the intersection of art and technology the artists selected for CONNECT 2019 are experimenting with space, time, form and sound while re-examining the way we communicate ideas and tell stories.
The eighteen artists represent thirteen countries and a variety of styles and processes. The results range from sensual abstraction to the strange visual effects of computer coding.
The work addresses personal, social and political issues relevant to our times.
Our common thread is an interest in expanding the concepts of art/film/technology and exploring the medium itself. We initially connected via Internet – Facebook / YouTube / Vimeo.
Most of us have never met in person but we have established a strong camaraderie through shared screenings around the world and/or our common love of the moving image.
Dee Hood, Curator, CONNECT 2019
http://www.videoartes.org/lana-z-caplan/
AGITATE:21C on FB https://www.facebook.com/groups/2964836420208278/members/
Sept 20-21, 2019
624 North Victory Boulevard
Burbank, CA 91502
Including Autopoiesis
http://vastlab.org/experimental19/
Including Patches of Snow in July
COMMUNITY
curated by Lili White
Anthology Film Archives
2nd and 2nd, NYC
July 17, 2019. 6:00 PM
with works by Lana Z Caplan, Evelin Stermitz, Giselle Chien, Meredith Moore, Sarah Harbridge, Caryn Cline & Linda Fenstermaker, Morrison Gong, Lisa Danker, Karissa Hahn, Maureen Zent
including Autopoiesis (still above) – US Premiere!
Tuesday, July 16th at Böttgerstraße 13, Berlin
Artists Without a Cause invites you to join us for our film screening “Consciousness of Changing Climate”! Featured films surround the topic of climate change and human relationships with this issue. This screening aims to explore, familiarize, and bring awareness to the environments around us. Along with this, AWAC and featured artists hope to show both abstract and direct examples of how climate change is effecting humans and other ecological functions.
– “Oro Blanco” by Gisela Carbajal Rodríguez
– “Questions for a Dinosaur” by Rachel Garber Cole
– “Panorama Panik Botanik” by Vera Sebert
– “Techno Inferno” by Farhanaz Rupaidha
– “Patches of Snow in July” by Lana Z Caplan
– “Totem” by Alex MacKenzie
video still from Patches of Snow in July
Click on thumbnail to expand image
Shed on Passive Sands (2018), is a weave of historical threads that creates a fabric of the place. These histories, spanning over 12,000 years, are comprised of the Dunes of the Chumash, a people nearly erased by the Spanish Missionaries; the Dunes of Cecil B. DeMille’s ancient Egyptian The Ten Commandments movie set; the Dunes of the Dunites, the artists, poets, nudists, and mystics living in the Dunes during the depression era; the Dunes of photographers Edward Weston and Ansel Adams’ sensual perfection; and the Dunes of the current day Dunites – the ATV riders who tear through the endangered plant species and pollute the air.
The seemingly empty expanse of sand of the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes has been a fertile tabula rasa for each successive cultural engagement. Today it has become a political and environmental battleground. The 18-mile coastal Dunes complex north of Santa Barbara, CA allows driving cars and off-road vehicles on the beach and the Dunes in the approximately 5-mile area owned by State Parks. The current 8-year war is between the multi-million dollar ATV industry and those residents in the adjacent communities whose health has been compromised due to the dust the ATVs create.
While the white dunes often appear as a blank, shifting landscape, through media and image, this project aims to pull up a history from beneath the surface to populate the Dune site with a more profound sense of place and meaning. This specific place is also representative of the larger current climate in the United States, the clashing of environmental conservation and public health with economic interest, and a document of the impact of the social landscape on yet another unique physical landscape and population of indigenous people.
Recent exhibitions including images from this series:
Griffin Museum of Photography, Boston, MA
Gallery NAGA, Boston, MA
University Art Gallery, Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, CA
Installation Documentation and Excerpts of Videos
Solo Exhibition
Gallery NAGA, Boston
September 2018
Including 5 works:
“Shed on the passive sands”, 23 min 4k video, monitor
“Naked to the sun”, 14 min 4k video, looping projection
“On the sands become these lilies”, forty 35mm text slides, auto-advancing slide projector, installation
“These chromatic gardens”, 6 min 360-video in headset, revolving stool, 12’x6’x1′ structure, Virtual Reality installation
Dunites, 6 archival pigment prints from the series, 24×32″
Click on thumbnail to expand image
Recorded across three continents, this series includes photographs and short films from sites that have been used for public executions at different times in history.
When I began this ongoing project, there was petitioning for Timothy McVeigh’s execution to be televised, a modern form of a public arena. The desire to watch or show people being killed, as perceived justice or as a political act, is still alive today all over the world evidenced in the ghastly videotaped beheadings broadcast on Youtube and social media sites.
I began this project with questions; What does a society choose to show of its history in public space? Are shifting values visible in the function of the space? Can images reflect the power of society to evolve a public consensus on state killing?
I found some sites that were quite venerated as places for public execution, such as St. Peter’s Square in Rome or the field in Salem, MA (now named Gallows Hill Park) where accused witches were hung. Some places are now well known for other reasons, such as the Louvre, in front of which the guillotine was installed during the French Revolution. The different ways in which the history of these places has been dealt with (some capitalizing on the executions, others concealing the execution history with other events that also occurred in these places) spoke more to me about present day morality and values in each country than the abolishment or continuation of capital punishment in those countries.
The photographs in this series are sepia-toned silver prints presented in French mats. This presentation is a reference to historical photographs and cataloguing of images made for documentation purposes. Each of the mats have calligraphic titles describing the dates and types of executions that occurred on that site, rather than the customary name and place pictured.
In 2007, the book “Sites of Public Execution” was published in conjunction with a solo exhibition of this series at the Danforth Museum (MA).
https://vimeo.com/154542512/2615192284
Using animation, heat sensitive camera footage from US border patrol screens, military bombing drone monitors, and other collected footage, Maelstroms is a mediation on the dehumanizing use of image technology to control borders by land, air and sea.
audio: Upon Maelstroms of Unbearable Reality by Steerage, courtesy of caduc. records
Selected Screenings:
– *Winner of Audience Choice Award* CROSSROADS 2016 (San Francisco, April 2016)
– Anthology Film Archives, Another Experiment by Women Film Festival (New York, NY, February 2016)
– Microscope Gallery Event Series (Brooklyn, October 2016)
– San Diego Underground Film Festival (San Diego, Nov 2016)
– Havana Film Festival (Havana, Cuba, December 2016)
– Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival (Hawick, Scotland, March 2017)
– Montreal Underground Film Festival (Montreal, May 2017)
– Chicago Underground Film Festival (Chicago, June 2017)
– Currents New Media Festival (Santa Fe, June 2017)
– Sign on / Sign off (Stuttgart and ACRE TV, June 2017)
– SDSU Downtown Gallery (San Diego, July 2017)
– WDNX Festival of Moving Image (Winnipeg, October 2017)
– Twisted Oyster Film Festival (Chicago, October 2017)
– Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson (Tucson, AZ, October – December 2017)
– Experimental Response Cinema (Austin, TX, January 2018)
– That One Film Festival (Muncie, IN, April 2018)
– The Vast Lab (Los Angeles, July 2108)
– Empirical Ideologies, Labocine, issue 26 (Online, September 2018)
– Other Cinema (San Francisco, October 2018)
– Revolutions per Minute Festival (Boston, February 2019)
– Short Movie Club Festival (Minsk, Belarus, March 2019)
Total running time of loop in installation: 45 minutes
Total running time of installation documentation: 9 minutes
The Loveliest Mountain of China (2012/14) is a 3-channel video installation that lays bare the bones of the participatory documentary medium, deconstructing narrative film production modalities, and presenting them across a wall space on three screens simultaneously. Comprised of one screen of interviews, one of fixed camera landscape views and one of “B-roll” of tourists posing in front of the mountain, a self-reflexive epi-narrative unfolds between the screens with an awareness of the illusion of ethnographic representation, gaps in translation, and the complexities of the politics of landscape. Ecological change is approached through the voices and perspectives of people who inhabit and visit – the locals and the tourists – the picturesque landscape of Huangshan (Yellow Mountain).
Click on thumbnail to expand image
Solo Exhibition
Gallery NAGA, Boston
January 2014
Lana Z Caplan, Gallery NAGA, Boston
“This is a place which cannot be described completely,” a female hotel worker in the mountains of China’s Huangshan region tells the artist Lana Z Caplan. The observation, included in Caplan’s three channel video installation The Loveliest Mountain of China (2014), captures the challenge the artist faced in creating the images in this show, “Peach Blossom Spring.” Also featuring 12 ink-jet prints and a wall-size photomural, the exhibition conveyed the impossibility of representing a given location with a single objective description.
In the video piece, one monitor shows the Hunagshan mountains from several vantage points during shifting light and weather. The next monitor displays tourists posing for pictures on a scenic overlook, and the third focus on people in the Huangshan tourism business – including porters, hotel employees and a local artist – explaining their impressions of the location where they earn a living. Change is a constant: clouds hide the sun, gusts stir branches and ponytails, cell phones ring. Caplan’s video highlights just how disparate experiences of the same spot can be, juxtaposing the magnificent spectacle of towering peaks with the bustle of tourism and the realties of everyday life.
Even Caplan’s still photographs suggest worlds colliding. In the wall-size photomural Shangri-La (2013), two roosters pause by a gate before a huge, postcard-pretty panorama of waterfalls and pagodas. Spectrum (2013) zeros in on a patch of rainy pavement where a yellow ginkgo leaf has landed on the yellow band of an oil slick’s rainbow. The most confounding picture of all, Tree-Lined (2013), appears to depict a woodsy scene with a gash through it. The forest is a fiction, though – a mere printed image on a pair of curtains – and the geometric shard slicing the pastoral landscape turns out to be a sliver of a construction site. Just beyond the scrim of the curtains, the chaotic scene of buildings being erected jostles against a vision of uncorrupted nature as vivid and insubstantial as a dream”
-Joanne Silver