Lana Z Caplan: Watch This

Patterned Black: John Eric Byers, Nelson Da Costa, David Phillips, Randal Thurston

June 8 – July 13 at Gallery NAGA

For its summer 2007 exhibitions, Gallery NAGA presents films and photographs by Lana Z Caplan, the Boston-based artist whose work has been given international exposure during the past two years, and a group show, Patterned Black, of four artists who share a formal approach while working with four different media.

Lana Z Caplan: Watch This and Patterned Black each run from June 8 through July 13.  A reception for the artists and the public will be held at the gallery on Friday, June 8 from 6 to 8 pm.

Since early 2006, Lana Z Caplan’s 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.  Her photographs have been shown at the John Stevenson Gallery in Manhattan and the Pearl Street Gallery in Brooklyn.

The 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.”

Patterned Black assembles a furnituremaker who sometimes carves reliefs for the wall, John Eric Byers; a painter, Nelson Da Costa; a multi-disciplinary artist who recently has been using magnets to arrange iron filings on aluminum, David Phillips; and an artist who covers expanses of wall with cut paper, Randal Thurston.  In the works shown, all share a formal approach, an overall pattern of positive/negative space defined by black forms.

Byers’s work is an extension of the furniture he has made for twenty years, mahogany thoroughly covered with his hand carving, finished in milk paint. 
Da Costa, a political refugee from Angola by way of Cuba, where he trained as an artist, is pursuing a master’s degree in the joint School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University program, painting works that are both boldly decorative and rife with symbolic retellings of his personal experience.