Lana Z Caplan: Dual

Jaclyn Kain: Pieces of Millie

January 6 – 28 at Gallery NAGA

In January, Gallery NAGA presents the work of two young photographers who use unorthodox photographic methods to explore such arenas as death, sexuality, and identity.

Lana Z Caplan: Dual and Jaclyn Kain: Pieces of Millie are both on exhibition from January 6 through 28.  A reception for the artists and the public will be held at the gallery on Friday, January 6 from 6 to 8 pm.  In addition, both will speak about their work on Saturday, January 14, Lana Z Caplan at 2 pm and Jaclyn Kain at 3 pm.

Lana Z Caplan has been busy.  In the past two years her photographic work has toured the country in a traveling exhibition on alternative photo processes and has been picked up by the John Stevenson Gallery in New York.  Locally, she’s been shown by the Photographic Resource Center, the Danforth Museum, and the Bakalar Gallery at the Massachusetts College of Art, where she organized The Midway Show.  Her film work has been shown in series at the Coney Island Film Festival and the Coolidge Corner Theater.

At NAGA, Caplan exhibits both film and large-scale tintypes which ruminate on generation, birth, and death by studying such objects as plaster torsos, skeletal remains, jars of eggs, furs, feathers, and fish.  The tintype process – a creation of the nineteenth century and, like others of its period, favored by a generation of photographers less interested in digital revolutions – with its green-black cast and lugubrious darks, is almost inherently spectral.  Caplan’s fascination with the intersections of desire, birth, and death seems natural to the medium’s qualities.

Working quite large, at 20 by 20 inches, Caplan’s application of light-sensitive emulsion onto the metal plates with her fingers results in rivulets and eddies of painterly action within the material of her images.  The film work shown – a two-and-a-half minute loop examining similar subjects – as been hand processed in chemical baths, layers of film touching and overlapping, generating different densities, patches of color, and obscurations.

“I suppose I like conflict and contradiction,” Caplan offers.  “I know I like setting up a visceral response.  I’m interested in the interpretation of viewers and in how the work makes them feel.”

Jaclyn Kain’s second NAGA exhibition is her first as Jaclyn Kain.  She was known as Jaclyn Salvaggio until her marriage this past fall.

Her photographic procedure has not changed, but her subject matter has.  Using a meticulous technique of tearing her prints apart in cross section, leaving the image on a sheet whose back has been pulled off and is thus more translucent and fibrous, Kain then uses her prints as negatives, beginning a process that repeats, using a positive image to print a negative image, then a negative to print a positive, her images becoming feathery and mottled and taking on the gestural quality of drawings.

In her previous work her models were set in complex interior or exterior backgrounds and functioned as actors in dream-like narratives.  In her new work, everything but the model is gone – the background, the clothing, the story.  “ I decided to remove all of that information,” Kain says.  “It’s just her, and there’s so much more to look at, even without everything we’ve removed.”

The model phases in and out of the background and sometimes shows as just a hint of a body.  But the most surprising consequence of this series is that, as Kain puts it, “she seems like all these different people.”

In fact, it’s almost impossible for the viewer to be certain any two of the images, let  alone all of them, show the same person.  The combination of Kain’s technique and her model’s variability have made a series in which one person shows a dozen drastically independent sides of herself.  And this isn’t just differences of mood, it’s apparent differences of age, weight, and physiognomy, truly different people.  Speaking of her model Millie, Kain says, “Even she was surprised.  She couldn’t believe it.”