Press Clippings

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."

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.

The Boston Globe
June 27, 2003

Living Arts
GALLERIES
by Cate McQuaid

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.

(...)

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.

The Boston Globe
February 7, 2003

Living Arts
GALLERIES
by Cate McQuaid

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.

(...)

The Boston Sunday Globe
January 27, 2002

Living Arts
JAW
by Hayley Kaufman

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.(...)

The Boston Globe
December 1, 2001

Living Arts
GALLERIES
by Cate McQuaid

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.(...)

Weekly Dig
November 7, 2001

"Recombining DNA: Lana Z Caplan's art at SCAT"
by Brett M. Rhyne