OCEANO (for seven generations)

Posted by lanazcaplan

OCEANO (for seven generations)

A monograph by Lana Z Caplan
press release


-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.

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