OTHER CINEMA October 5, 2024 ATA Gallery, 992 Valencia St, San Francisco, CA 94110 More information to come
showing HOLLYWOOD, an episode from a longer work in progress based in the Oceano Dunes.
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.
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
BEHIND THE LENS: DOCUMENTS FOR THE 21st CENTURY RI Center for Photographic Arts Exhibition: February 15th – March 15th, 2024 Opening Reception: February 15th 5:00- 8:00pm
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, 2pmEST. The talk will be available on Zoom – Register here
Zoom panel with the artists – March 7, 7pm EST. Register here
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.
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/
-128 pages, 70 b/w and color images -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 community 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 decade-long legal battle with nearby residents over air quality.
Oceano offers both an interrogation of and a feminist response to photographic conventions regarding landscape and representation, confronts historic approaches to portraiture by enlisting the past and present inhabitants in performative and co-constructed moments, and questions legacies of colonization, utopian ideologies, and the future for the politically charged and environmentally threatened Oceano Dunes.
13th ANNUAL ALCHEMY FILM AND MOVING IMAGE FESTIVAL
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/
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.
“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
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 PostcommodityCollective 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.
FISURA, INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF EXPERIMENTAL FILM & VIDEO
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
No Emoji for Ennui: Lana Z Caplan, Ross Meckfessel, Alison Nguyen, Matt Whitman
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.
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.
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.
‘Collected Dispersal’ Rosemary Taylor | ‘Patches of Snow in July’ Lana Z Caplan | ‘ Residual Minority’ Mieke Vanmechele | ‘Boy and the Sea’ Sarahjane Swan & Roger Simian | ‘Ruru’ Denise Batchelor | ‘ Emotion Over Raisin’ Ruth Waters | ‘Frozen’ Adonia Bouchehri | ‘The Hearing of the Eye’ Alessia Cecchet | ‘River Ghosts’ Jonathan Johnson | ‘Passage’ Richard Ashrowan
