Oceano (for Seven Generations)

Oceano, California - A place of history and controversy
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 most 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 with yak titʸu titʸu yak tilhini 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, a large State Park in southern San Luis Obispo County in the Guadalupe-Nipomo dunes complex.

Author: Lana Z. Caplan
Publisher: Kehrer Verlag
Published: 11/28/2023
Pages: 128
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 2.40lbs
Size: 9.60h x 11.90w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9783969001233

About the Author
Based in social practice, historical research, and a desire to unearth the unseen, photographer and filmmaker Lana Z Caplan's works are often inspired by sub-cultural notions of utopia - where one person's utopia is another's undoing.
Parts of her current project based in the Oceano Dunes have been in solo and group exhibitions including the Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego and Gallery NAGA (Boston). Highlights of her international exhibition record include Museum of Contemporary Art (Tucson), Griffin Museum of Photography (Boston), Anthology Film Archives (NYC), Inside Out Art Museum (Beijing), National Gallery of Art (Puerto Rico), Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo (Mexico City). Her work has been reviewed and featured in publications such as ARTnews, Los Angeles Times, Hyperallergic.com, Lenscratch.com and The Boston Globe. She is the recipient of several grants including from Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Puffin Foundation, and the Film/Video Studio Program Fellowship at the Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, OH).
Caplan earned her BA and BS from Boston University, her MFA from Massachusetts College of Art. After many years in Brooklyn and Boston, Caplan relocated to California and is currently an Associate Professor of Photography and Video at Cal Poly, in San Luis Obispo.