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Press Clippings
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South End News
November 22, 2007
"Whose line is it?"
By Scott Kearnan |
20 artists showcased in Mills Gallery exhibition.
...
Another highlight is Lana Z Caplan's Thinking
of You, a looped five-minute video of character sketches.
The installation displays a series of penciled headshots. Grainy
videotape quality, stop-motion editing, and pulsating lights
lend the eerie
quality of a comic book snuff film. Each sketched face is
accompanied
by a revelatory statement of character: "He is irritatingly
pleasant," reads one. "She believes she's forgotten," says
another. "He
has trouble looking her in the eyes." reveals a third. Whether
the handful of misspellings (including "helmut," "creul,"
and "aprehension,") are the result of creative license or a hasty
spellcheck is up for debate. But gallery visitors are sure
to agree on the shrewd, haunting nature of the piece.
... |
North Adams Transcript
June 21, 2007
"Old technology creates modern visions"
By John E. Mitchell
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Thursday, June 21 NORTH ADAMS — In a
variation of the words of philosopher Marshall McLuhan, photographer
Lana Z. Caplan's work shows that the medium is at least a portion
of the message, as is the process attached to the chosen medium.
Caplan's work runs a gamut of alternative processes of photography,
taking advantage of the aesthetics related to each in order to
explore the themes that interest her, as well as the methods
of production. One area of photographic labor for Caplan as been
in
the production of tintypes, a style of photography popular at
the end of the 19th century that employs black metal and negative
images
to create the finished product. Caplan was as drawn to the potential
flaws of the medium as she was to the colors and texture.
"
I really liked the way the actual surface is thick and bubbly," she
said. "The historic tintypes are much smoother than the ones
I'm making intentionally. I really like being able to see — almost
like paint — the drips and the bubbles and the gradation of
tone that you get when you coat thicker or thinner, so it really
becomes a compositional element in addition to image."
Caplan takes a painterly approach to constructing her tintype images,
creating mysterious still life scenes involving chairs, suitcases,
insect collections
and mannequin parts that she augments with the particulars of the process.
Caplan taught herself the tintype process after spending time with
other process types — the major difference between them, she says, is chemistry. The
rest involves hand coating the materials and exposing them, which does take a
bit of practice to exact the artistic control that she requires.
"
It's a very, very finicky process," said Caplan. "It requires
very extreme temperatures to get things to work — you have
to heat things up and they cool down very quickly, and then if it
didn't work you have to reheat things. In that process, everything
could spoil. It also requires complete darkness for a good part of
the process, so I had to build a special way of getting in and out
of the darkroom so I could eat."
It is also a time-consuming process. Caplan started with 4-by-5-inch
images, but once she moved onto 20-by-20, it took much longer to
go through the routine of coating
a plate, letting it dry,
washing the metal and more. "
It gets to the point where I can make maybe one in a session of
12 hours," said Caplan Despite the possible drudgery of the
method, Caplan finds herself entranced by the black and metal of
a finished image that makes
it all worthwhile to her. "
Every time I hate the process, I get a plate that makes me fall
back in love with it," she said.
In her earlier photographic experiments, Caplan had worked in
photograms, which is photography without a camera. The method
involves laying
objects down on light
sensitive material and shining light down for the exposure. The idea is that
you are leaving shadows of the image on the paper, but Caplan played with
the kinds of objects she worked with to create images that were
more texturally
complex.
"
With the more transparent objects, you don't just have a shadow,
you also see through the image," said Caplan. "I was
using flowers and bones and different detritus from animals and
plants,
combining them with live flowers. You see the veins in the petals
or the veins in the leaves, or you see vertebrae in the spinal
structure, and I was combining these life forms."
Caplan was doing a residency at the Contemporary Artists Center
in North Adams a few years back when she began to work with cyanotypes,
a type of monochromatic
photography that uses its chemical coating to turn ultraviolet rays into
gray-blue tones on watercolor paper. Caplan used this method
to document sights that
entranced her along Route 2, between the Berkshires and Boston.
She later extended the
project and added some images from Atlantic City. She also worked with palladium
prints, a process involving paper hand-coated with a platinum-related
substance, which creates
a black/brown tone to shadow
areas and provides sharp detail. The reasoning behind this process is that
the photographer is working to achieve a heightened, smoother print — something
Caplan found she was at odds with. "
I was frustrated by that process," she said. "I'm a perfectionist,
so any sort of imperfection in this process, it was a wash and
I had to start over. I turned to tintypes, where I could embrace
all
the imperfections — enhance them and add to them. I've
got to the point now where I'm a perfectionist about where they
lie on
the image and I'm probably discarding just as many as I did with
the platinum and palladium, but it's different."
Caplan has lately moved onto film projects, but still embraces
the same do-it-yourself aesthetic with those, working with old
technology and utilizing the flaws to
create its own singular beauty.
"
I hand process some of my Super 8 films," said Caplan. "One
of the films I made looked like a tintype. It was black and white,
but when you hand process, you get blues and greens and overlaps
and bubbles from the chemicals and bleaching, so that was a natural
thing for me."
For some of her films, she uses the same props
as in her photographic work. Even if she hasn't, she has come to
find the different
methods she uses as multiple
means to the same expressions. They all spring from the same brain. "
The subject matter of the work is the same, because I'm thinking
about the same things," said Caplan, "I'm just using
different tools to examine the same subjects."
One photographic series of sepia-toned images called "Sites
of Public Execution" has
been adapted to film. The project is one that Caplan has been working on
for several years now when she travels, exploring places where
people have been executed
and how they look today. Caplan finds that revealing the dark history of
unassuming, even grand, scenes can really undercut a viewer's
expectations from a photo. "
One of them is the Louvre in Paris," said Caplan. "They
had a guillotine during the French Revolution, but it's the
Louvre, you see a picture. I put a French matte around it and it
says, in
Edwardian script, 'Site of public execution by guillotine,
1792 to 1793.' You expect it to say "The Louvre, Paris," but
it tells you this other history of the place."
Caplan shows these photos in their still format and also as
part of a slide show that she has fashioned inside a small
darkened
box, with a digital video screen
inside, an experience she likens to the old Magic Lanterns. Caplan has
also varied this filmed collage presentation with other projects
using
single-frame images.
In one, she documented every arch of the Coliseum in Rome — in another,
every face of every visitor one day in St. Peter's Square, each one there to
see the pope. These photos are shown at regular film speed — 18 frames
per second.
Caplan's hands-on work doesn't usually begin until she has a fully-formed
concept in her head, but the physical nature of it requires some understanding
that
improvisation is inevitable.
"
I definitely work from those eureka moments and then I'll run with
that for awhile until it feels like something else is influencing
it in a better way," she said.
It's not important to Caplan that viewers see things from her
point of view, however. The way she sees it is that she goes
on her journey
in order to allow
others to pick it up and run from her finishing point.
"
There's a guided place that you're putting the viewer and then leaving
it to them to use their own psyche or their own references to make
something for themselves from it," said Caplan, "which
I find much more interesting than telling people what I think.
Most of the time, people are more interested in what they
think."
What is most important to Caplan is how she arrives at these
finales for others to witness, and that is all in the processes
she utilizes.
She is not content
to be someone behind a machine that captures — if she were a painter,
she says, she would paint. However, she is a photographer and she adapts
this need
to that calling.
"
I'm an artist, I like to make things," said Caplan. "It's
not about taking pictures for me, or about taking it to the lab and
having them make me the perfect print, it's about me actually making
something. I like putting my hands — not necessarily in the
chemicals, which happens — but I like physically making
something."
While some embrace new technology as the answer to their
artistic questions, Caplan has been able to take what is
old and point
it in a new direction. Caplan
has taken the methods of media that most people have long since discarded
and pull out the aesthetic qualities of each for use in her
expression. The history
of photography is the palette she chooses to work from.
"
I feel like we have all of these options to choose what it will look
like, so why be limited to one way?" said Caplan. "I
think that all those choices are what makes something successful
or not."
Lana Z. Caplan will be showing her tintypes as part of
the "Pushing Light" show
at Kolok Gallery in North Adams — www.kolokgallery.com. She can
be found online at www.lanazcaplan.com.
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North Adams Transcript January 30, 2007
"Mixing it up
Artists wrap up 100 hours"
By Jennifer Huberdeau
|
Artists have been working since Friday to fill
Gallery 51 in North Adams with their works during the '100 Hours
in the Woodshed' event.
NORTH ADAMS — Among the scraps of magazine
pages, old cups of coffee and discarded Papa Gino's pizza boxes,
16 artists cut, pasted, sewed and spliced as they raced against
the clock Monday afternoon during the final hours of the "100
Hours" art marathon held at Gallery 51.
The event, which spanned four days and nights, brought together 20 collage
artists from not only the Berkshires but also from New York City, Boston
and Canada to create new work for the gallery's newest exhibit, "100
Hours in the Woodshed," which opens tonight. An opening reception will
be held from 6 to 9.
" January tends to be a quiet month," said local artist Daniel "Danny
O" O'Connor on Monday. "The big idea was to bring people to town who
are not familiar with the Berkshires and take care of them. Hopefully, their
memories will be of the Berkshires as this comfortable arts utopia. That's why
very few Berkshire artists were chosen for the event, but we do have a strong
local component." O'Connor proposed the idea of holding a "collage
party" to Jonathan Secor, MCLA director of special programs, after attending
one at the ZieherSmith Gallery in New York City's Chelsea art district last summer.
As part of the show, artists created their pieces for the exhibit in the gallery,
which was open to the public for the 100 hours they had to make the artwork.
O'Connor said more than 200 people toured the gallery on Saturday alone. " I
think we got the residual from the free day at Mass MoCA," he said. "But
it's really great. We have people that have come in every day to see the progress.
We have people who come in at 9 p.m. to see what's gone on during the day." Secor
said the show was being well received by local residents. " On Saturday,
the crowds almost became a problem," he said. "At one point, you could
look out at the gallery and there wasn't room to move, never mind work. I can
imagine how hard it is for some artists to work beside other artists instead
of being alone in their own studio. Then you add the crowds in."
(...)
Lana Z. Caplan of Boston was in the final stages
of editing together vintage movie trailers — creating short
videos that explore the topic of relationships. " I've made
a one-minute romance made from the trailers and another that
explores relationships through a lion and tiger fight," she
said. "I want people to take away the idea that some relationships
are more complicated than others — and as equally as heated.
In the film, you can see (the lion and tiger) are clearly not
trying to maim each other, they're playing. It's like some more
complicated relationships." Caplan also created an abstract
film collage with the optical sound strips from the lion and
tiger fight scenes. "You're looking at the sound, but it's
silent," she said. "It's the sound of the lion, tiger
and the fight, yet it's silent. I'm thinking of titling it 'Roar.' " (...)
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American
Photo On Campus September 2004
”Tin
Woman: Lana Z Caplan Finds New Meaning in an Old Photographic
Process." by
Nina Gantcheva
|
For
Lana Z Caplan, alternative and antique photo processes are more
than a way to give her images distinctive look. "I want
to conceptualize themes that run throughout generations and time
periods," says the photographer. Though she has explored
both cyanotype and palladium printing, much of Caplan's work
involves variations on the tintype - a process that has taken
on political significance for the photographer. She points out
that Civil War soldiers often had tintype portraits made to send
home to loved ones, and that she began to create hers around
the time of the American invasion of Iraq. "Both were, and
are, times of polarization in our country, " she explains.
(...)
"All
the images have an underlying text or narrative that is both
personal and has universal symbolism," says Caplan. "some
of them will conjure recognizable iconography." The pear,
for example, evokes both sustenance and a female shape, and
the torn strips of bedsheets used to suspend it suggest "things
are bound and not serving their purpose," says Caplan.
The sea horse images challenges notions of gender because males
of the species bear its young. Caplan sums things up this way
on her website: "In all of my work, I am examining the
beauty and tension in decay, the rhythmic cycles in nature,
and the societal emotions that surround the fleeting, dying
and everyday reality of living."
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The Boston
Herald
Friday, July 4, 2003
"Old techniques give focus to photos"
by Joanne Silver
|
Day after day, Lana Z Caplan watched death overtake the orchid
sitting by the window of her Roxbury studio. Slowly, inexorably,
the stalk lost one blossom, then another, then another, until all
that remained was a bare stick in a vase.
Faced with graphic evidence of life's transience, Caplan did what
she is most comfortable doing: She turned it into art. "20 Days
in December," a grid of 20 small images, records the orchid's metamorphosis
in the antique, velvety tones of a palladium print.
Why would a lively 30-year-old photographer employ methods that
flourished in the 19th century? "I've always focused on a similar
conceptual theme: the experience of existence," Caplan said, adding
that this concern is "best portrayed with older techniques that
remind viewers of historic images and are therefore free of popular
culture associations."
On a sweltering June morning, the artist looked surprisingly cool,
dressed in a black sleeveless shirt, black capri pants and old-fashioned
blue sneakers, with her blond hair hanging loose over her shoulders.
She lucked out in finding a parking space near Gallery NAGA, where
her debut solo show is on view. "Lana Z Caplan: Photograms, Palladium
Prints and Tintypes" displays a remarkably coherent vision, as
the photographer probes the form and the nature of living things
in a variety of media. Only the tiny Polaroid transfers on glass
represent a modern technique, but even these have the feel of something
rescued from a long-lost archive.
As a child in Pennsylvania and later New Jersey, Caplan always
liked to take pictures. She also liked collecting things. She would
capture lightning bugs long enough to see the light blink before
letting them go. She would nurture abandoned birds' eggs until
the babies could fly away. When she and her older sister gathered
berries, they would mash them and make secret potions.
Initially, the artist concentrated on painting and ceramics, two
media that involve a lot of hands-on activity. Gradually, she veered
toward photography in her undergraduate years at Boston University
and afterward when studying at the Massachusetts College of Art
and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. She felt drawn to historical
processes because they allowed her to create the image during the
printing process.
Instead of pressing a button, she slathered chemicals on paper,
placed objects on light-sensitive paper, painted coatings onto
metal plates and waited patiently for the mixtures to air-dry. "It's
an all-day process to get that one moment," she said.
Time's effects are a powerful presence in Caplan's art. Although
her images are all still shots, the artist heightens the fleeting
quality of the moments she has preserved. She has arranged bees
among the petals of the photogram "Quarry Flowers," and crab legs
within the stalks of "Lisianthus." While echoing the forms within
each plant type, these unusual additions also serve as a reminder
of the universality of brief life spans.
"I like the integration between the two elements," the photographer
said of these strange hybrids. "They show a similarity in form.
They show we all share structural as well as experiential elements." Looking
at her own work, the lifelong collector pointed to a skate egg
sac that never developed, crab molts that have been shed, crab
legs left after the creature died, cut flowers destined to fade
quickly.
A bunch of tulips dangles from cloth bandages in one haunting
tintype. Caplan was listening to Nirvana when she made that image.
Little ballerina dolls hang suspended in another tintype. Back
in her studio, Caplan recently experimented with wrapped and hanging
locusts – at least until she dismantled the arrangement out
of consideration for an overnight guest.
Are these bandaged items wounded? Healing? Bound in restraints?
Caplan responded, "I like that there's the ambiguity. I like mystery,
personal interpretation. I don't like it all spelled out."
Lana Z Caplan exhibition, at Gallery NAGA, 67 Newbury St., Boston,
through July 18. Free. 617-267-9060. Also showing at NAGA: "On
Closer Inspection: Marks of Making in the Field."
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Weekly
Dig
July 2, 2003
"Lana Z Caplan’s
Photograms,
Palladium Prints, and Tintypes at Gallery NAGA"
by Sady Sullivan
|
It’s ok to go into a gallery,
even one on Newbury Street, sweaty from bike riding and wearing
a grubby skirt – you don't need art school cred on your sleeve,
or a matching hat and bag to prove you are there to buy. Arthur
Dion, director of Gallery NAGA (located in that gothic church building
on the corner of Berkeley and Newbury Streets), can’t contain
his enthusiasm about their current show Photograms, Palladium Prints,
and Tintypes by Lana Z Caplan. “We are so delighted
to help launch her work!” he said, “ This is the debut
of someone who is very interesting to us, a young artist whose
work is technically strong and has intriguing content.”
You might have seen Lana Z Caplan expertly snapping shots of
performers at the Middle East and elsewhere… little did
you know that she has also mastered historic photographic processes
and absorbed their cultural resonance. “I like that
it’s a much slower, hand manipulated process, much more
thought out than 35mm click-click-click. Setting up the
image, coating the plate with light sensitive material - it is
like painting,” she says, “With the historic processes,
like tintypes for instance, you can’t go into a store and
buy it all prepared, you get the chemicals and the paper and
then experiment. It took me awhile to figure out how to
direct the imperfections.”
Tintypes were first used in the US in 1856 and are made by coating
iron (not tin, strangely enough) with a light sensitive collodion
silver mixture, giving them a dark reflective otherworldly glow. Tintypes
were common during the Civil War because, unlike other photographs
which at the time were printed on glass, tintypes are rugged
and durable and so soldiers could mail their portraits home to
loved ones from the encampment. Caplan’s tintypes
capture the power of the glowing eyes of a dead soldier but with
imagery associated with traditional still-life which has been
eroticized, challenged, brought to the brink: fleshy pears dangle,
bound by frayed cloth criss-crossing their curves; a dragonfly,
caught, hangs strung up by a human spider tendency.
The 6 tintypes in the Dinner Settings series are framed by oval
gold leaf and appear Victorian and formal until you look close
enough to see that on each plate rests different detritus: Wellfleet
horseshoe crab molts, Concord cat skull, North Adams sparrow
skeleton. These pieces together are a beautiful shamanistic
homage to places, time, life, death.
“Tintypes are devoid of pop culture, modern society. The
work I’ve been doing for the past five years has a lot
to do with the struggle of existence, conflict, war, destruction,
survival, and similarities between all life forms –the
inherent beauty in that plant life, animal life, human life,
all have the same experience of existence even within structure
and form,” reflects Caplan.
The Polaroid emulsion lift transfers on glass, the most modern
process in the show, are also full of ceremonial reverence: animal
skulls, again bound and dangling, next to upside down flowers
like Paleolithic bird feet, recall some strange body submitted
to ancient burial rites, while the shadow of the images passing
through the fragile glass plate onto the wall conjures the spirit.
Caplan’s photograms recall Chinese ink brush paintings,
petals fading like trails of smoke, while x-rays capture the
delicate wisps deep inside buds yet to bloom. The platinum/palladium
prints depict the slow decay of an orchid over 20 days. “I
chose palladium printing, a 19th century process, for this subject
because it has a very precious quality,” says Caplan, “and
visually the texture is velvety, like orchid petals. It is very
expensive, pristine, the most archival, the most permanent, perfect
for re-presenting the precious impermanence of daily life.”
And while you are there at Gallery NAGA, check out a must-see
painting by Masako Kamiya called Dragonfly Hunting: tiny pin-head
stalagmites of gouache cover a panel in buzzing frenetic loops
and darts, orange, green, yellow, red, layers like radioactive
sediment.
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The
Boston Globe
June 27, 2003
Living Arts
GALLERIES
by Cate McQuaid
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Lana Z Caplan has her first solo show at Gallery NAGA. She's just
30, but already a jack-of-all-trades in photography: The show includes
tintypes, palladium prints, Polaroid transfers on glass, and photograms,
which are images made when you lay objects directly on light-sensitive
film or paper. Caplan's a painterly photographer, and the different
processes give her an opportunity to use emulsion, chemicals, and
even ink to create atmosphere in her images.
She takes the natural world as her theme: "20 Days in December" features
a grid of 20 small black-and-white prints documenting the bloom
and death of an orchid. The photograms, which show up as inky shadows
on white paper, conflate different elements of nature. "Lisianthus" appends
a dying stalk on the top of a thriving flower. The moody, gray-green
tones of the tintypes work well for her life-on-the-edge-of-death
ideas. "Dragonfly" portrays that insect trapped in a glass jar,
which is suspended by torn fabric.
(...)
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Gallery
NAGA press release
May, 2003 |
LANA Z CAPLAN: Photograms,
Palladium Prints, and Tintypes |
ON CLOSER INSPECTION:
Elizabeth Cheek, Bronlyn Jones, Masako Kamiya,
Agnes Martin, David Moore, James Siena
May 30 – July 18, 2003 at Gallery NAGA
For its summer show Gallery NAGA presents the debut exhibition of a young
photographer who practices historic photographic methods and a group
show that encourages the careful examination of putatively minimal
paintings and prints.
Lana Z Caplan: Photograms, Palladium Prints,
and Tintypes and On Closer Inspection: Marks of Making
in the Field both run from May 30 through July 18. A
reception for the artists and the public will be held at the
gallery on Friday, May 30 from 6 to 8 pm. In addition,
Lana Z Caplan will speak about her work on Saturday, June 7
at 2 pm.
Lana Z Caplan is a Boston-based multimedia artist
who has done extensive work with historic photographic processes. All
of her work in this exhibition has been made in ways originated
in the nineteenth century. (Specific descriptions of the
history and chemistry of the techniques is available from the
gallery.)
Caplan’s various technical approaches to
making images are unified by her thematic concerns, which revolve
around the life, death, and decay of living things. In
some works – as in her progressive palladium prints of
blossoming orchids, shot daily as the lush flowers weaken and
eventually drop their petals – this theme is evident. In
other works, for example in her stately black-and-white photography
of wildflowers into which she has unobtrusively inserted such
detritus of death as bones and dead bugs, it’s implicit.
Concentrating on the fleeting nature of existence,
Caplan’s works make a strong case for photography’s
ability to preserve transient glories. In the luscious tonal
undulations of emulsion she’s spread onto metal plates
with her and in the delicate graduations of grey made by light
passing through blossoms, the work emphasizes beauty’s
fragility.
In a statement she’s written, Caplan says, “I
am focusing on how all living things are somehow similar at all
stages of existence and the beauty and horror that lies within
these affinities.”
In presenting On Closer Inspection: Marks
of Making in the Field, the gallery suggests that some
minimal work is best understood if the subtle evidence of the
work’s execution – sometimes noticeable only with
scrutiny – is seen as gestures which inflect its structure. The
paintings and prints in the show generally have clear grid
or geometric forms that define their appearance from a normal
viewing distance; from up close, however, one sees the marks
the artist’s hand made in constructing these larger patterns.
Elizabeth Cheek, Bronlyn Jones, Masako Kamiya,
and David Moore are Boston-based painters for whom, respectively,
tiny drawn lines, or slight irregularities of painted forms,
or daubs of paint atop one another, or thin slices into the paint’s
surface give their paintings’ faces lines of personality
and experience. James Siena is a New York-based painter
and printmaker whose strongly patterned black-and-white etching
can be seen to build from thousands of tiny cross-hatchings. Agnes
Martin, arguably the most important minimal painter, is represented
here by an untitled 1998 lithograph, whose geometric pattern
is occupied by a delicate haze that barely floats in its space.
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The
Boston Globe
February 7, 2003
Living Arts
GALLERIES
by Cate McQuaid
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ABERRANT BEHAVIOR
"Between Evolution and Aberration: Works
of Imaginary Anatomy" at the Fort Point Point Arts Community
Gallery has a similar agenda.(...) Here, it's all about mutation.
Lana Z Caplan (...) makes luminous black-and-white photos of
plants that appear to be naturally developing unlikely features,
such as goldenrod with dragonfly wings.
(...)
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The
Boston Sunday Globe
January 27, 2002
Living Arts
JAW
by Hayley Kaufman
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MAKING THE SCENE ONCE MORE
(...)
Before the padlocks click shut on this Fort Point
institution, the Revolving Musuem offers one more show. It will
be experimental of course.
It was the local artist Jeff Smith who came up
with the idea for "The Experiment Show." He and co
curator Ana Crowley, 28, were brainstorming on ways to create
an interactive show – one that would get art fans participating
in and with the exhibits. so Smith dreamed up the experiment
concept: Artist would create pieces of art, as well as hypotheses
about how audience members would react to them. then, as in any
good science experiment, those hypotheses would be tested, conclusions
reached, and results posted.(...)
Then there's Lana Z caplan's piece, which funnels
people into a 20-foot-long, curtained hallway where they are
exposed to a variety of provocative photographs. As the stop
o each, viewers will be asked to choose one word that best describes
the image. Caplan predicts that the men will tend to use nouns.
Women, she thinks will probably invoke adjectives.(...)
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The
Boston Globe
December 1, 2001
Living Arts
GALLERIES
by Cate McQuaid
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HEADING EAST
"Works of an Eastern Nature" at Media
Gallery starts with he prints and sculptures of Shannon Goff,
who has studied Japanese woodblock printing in Japan, and follows
it up with artists who have a bent toward the Far East. (...)
Lana Caplan's photos read like Calligraphy, with shadows and
silhouettes of plants hinting at the delicately intangible.(...)
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Weekly
Dig
November 7, 2001
"Recombining
DNA: Lana Z Caplan's art at SCAT"
by Brett M. Rhyne
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Lana Z Caplan's art is a matter of life and death,
but not necessarily in the way you might think. In her printmaking,
Caplan combines cut flora with parts of dead fauna and captures their
silhouettes on creamy , light-sensitive paper. their lack of color
allows visual confusion between, or merging of, objects. The products
are X-rays of hybrid creatures, the imagines results of intriguing
gene-grafting experiments. In the most successful of the works, whole
animals are off shoots of plants: a sparrow grows as a night-blooming
cirrus leaf; a bee emerges as a lady bell stamen; a moth blooms as
a daisy flower. in others, animal parts mimic elements of plants:
frog legs replace cosmos stamen, or crab legs stand in for Lisianthus
leaves. In one striking mutation, an entirely new, horseshoe crab-like
creature emerges with the body of a hosta leaf and a tail of vertebrae;
one wonders if its resemblance to the prehistoric crustacean marks
evolution or devolution. caplan's images are beautiful and at times
unsettling. Her sophisticated consideration of the cycle of life
and death is more evocative of Cronenberg's Fly than Frankenstein's
monster. Ultimately, her work embraces renewal, not decay. |
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