Lana Z Caplan is a Boston-based multimedia artist who has done extensive work with historic photographic processes and with film. Since early 2006, her films have been shown in film festivals and galleries in Boston, New York, and Washington, DC; in Barcelona, Spain; Medellin, Columbia; and at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Mexico City.

Caplan’s various technical approaches to making images are unified by her thematic concerns, which revolve around the growth, death, and decay of living things. Her June, 2007 Gallery NAGA show is the most comprehensive collection yet of her film and photographic work and presents for the first time her series of Execution Sites photographs. “Since 2002, I’ve been researching former sites of public executions,” Caplan explains, “interested in how the function of a place changes and what it holds of its history.”

Her photographs, shot in Beijing, Paris, London, Florence, and Rome, present the contemporary appearances of locales used for hangings, beheadings, and burnings, some in the transient fury of revolution, some in long-term state-sanctioned spectacles. The meticulous sepia-toned silverprints, in decorative mats with hand lettered labeling, recall the mementos of a privileged traveler of a century ago.

“In the past year,” Caplan continues, “the Execution Sites has incorporated film as well as photography, which has brought in the human element, both crowds and individuals. The contrast of the film and photography brings forward the nature of each. The stills seem excessively still and frozen, and the films seem excessively in motion.”

In another kind of contrast, Caplan’s short films After the Pope (5 minutes) and In Out (1 minute), shot respectively at former execution sites St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican and the Colosseum in Rome, are accompanied in this show by other Caplan films of sexuality and romance like Love in the Afternoon (1 minute), a tale of “cheap sex” edited by Caplan from found 16mm footage of 1970s movie trailers. “We have the capacity for these extremes,” Caplan comments, “to passionately love and to able to kill. I want to look at both sides of the coin.”