Lana Z Caplan | Oceano Artist Talk & Book Signing

Join us for an in person event with photographer Lana Z Caplan. Her book Oceano explores the inhabitants, visitors and legacy of California’s Oceano Dunes. Lana will be giving a talk about the book and photographic series and signing books after.

These are the dunes of Edward Weston’s iconic photos; of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 buried movie set for The Ten Commandments; of the Dunites— the artists, poets, nudists, and mystics who lived in dune shacks from the 1920s to the 40s—hosts to Weston during shooting trips; and fundamentally, of the native Chumash. These dunes now host a landscape of ATVs, inciting a decade-long legal battle with nearby residents over air quality. Lana Z Caplan attended Air Pollution Control District hearings, met with historians, scoured archives, and collaborated withyak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash tribal leadership to excavate these histories in images. Ultimately, Oceano questions the legacies of colonization, photographic history, utopian ideology, and the future for the politically charged and environmentally threatened Oceano Dunes.

Books will be available at the talk on June 21st. If you wish to pre-purchase a book directly, here is a link to Lana’s website for purchase.

About Lana Z Caplan

Lana Z Caplan works across various media – including single-channel films or videos in essay form, interactive installations, video art, and photography. Her works are often inspired by sub-cultural notions of utopia – where one person’s utopia is another’s undoing.

Some highlights of her exhibition record include Museum of Contemporary Art (Tucson), Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo (Mexico City), Institute of Contemporary Art, San Diego, Anthology Film Archives (NYC), Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, UVP/Lightwork @ Everson Museum (Syracuse), Griffin Museum of Photography (Boston), Inside Out Art Museum (Beijing), National Gallery of Art (Puerto Rico), Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris, Edinburgh International Film Festival, CROSSROADS Festival (San Francisco), Microscope Gallery (Brooklyn), Antimatter [media art] (Victoria, BC), Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival (Scotland), Experiments in Cinema (Albuquerque).

Her work has been reviewed and featured in publications such as ARTnews, LA Times, Hyperallergic.com, Lenscratch.com and The Boston Globe and she has received several grants including from Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Film/Video Studio Program Fellowship at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, OH. She is published a monograph of her most recent project, Oceano (for seven generations), with Kehrer Verlag, in November 2023.

Caplan earned her BA and BS from Boston University, her MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and is currently an Associate Professor of Photography and Video at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.