Oceano – for seven generations
Lana Z Caplan
Opening Reception: Saturday, Jan 25, 2025, 2 – 5 pm
Exhibit: Jan 25 – Mar 1, 2025
(Gallery closed from 4 to 6 PM on Wednesdays from February 5th through February 26th)
Book Signing and Q & A: Saturday,
Feb 22, 2025, 2 pm
Lana Z Caplan in conversation with
Ron Beinner/book signing
Curated by: Melissa Castro Keesor
Banner image – Abel, Oceano State Vehicular Recreation Area © Lana Z Caplan 2023
Edward Weston’s iconic modernist images made the Oceano Dunes famous for photographers. Lana Z Caplan’s project Oceano (for seven generations) tells the story of the Oceano Dunes through the dunes’ successive inhabitants, while interrogating photographic history and convention. Co-constructed, performative portraits contrast the historic inhabitants – the Indigenous yak tityu tityu yak tiłhini (ytt) Northern Chumash Tribe, Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 ancient Egyptian film set, the Modernists, and a colony of depression-era artist and mystic squatters – with the current ATV riding community that is the source of a public health crisis for neighboring communities. Black and white landscape images that resemble Weston’s are flipped into negatives, confusing the notion of photographic truth and challenging the male-dominated history of the genre.

This landscape is not the utopian, mythological, American West landscape of the Modernists. Yet this is, more profoundly a landscape of stolen territory, exploited and extracted resources, homeless encampments, and a habitat in ecological peril. Through photographs, video and text, Oceano (for seven generations) ultimately aims to question legacies of colonization, media history, and the politics of land use – charging this cultural landscape with significance far beyond the Oceano Dunes.
*The subtitle for the book for seven generations comes from a phrase used by Lorie Lathrop Laguna, ytt Northern Chumash Tribe, in a phone conversation with Caplan― “Our decisions are made while thinking seven generations into the future”. The Seventh Generation Principle is believed to date back to the twelfth century Great Law of Peace of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.
Artist Bio
Photographer and filmmaker Lana Z Caplan makes conceptual research and history-based projects that focus on environmental and social justice topics. Her recent photographic monograph, Oceano (for seven generations) published by Kehrer Verlag, is in the collection of museums including Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Getty Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Boston and The Cleveland Museum of Art. Some highlights of her exhibition record include Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego, Everson Museum of Art, Inside Out Art Museum Beijing, Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo Mexico City, National Gallery of Art Puerto Rico, Griffin Museum of Photography, and numerous film festivals around the world. Her work has been featured and reviewed in publications such as ARTnews, Hyperallergic.com, LA Times, Lenscratch.com and The Boston Globe.
Caplan earned her BA and BS from Boston University and MFA in Photography from Massachusetts College of Art. After many years in Boston and NYC, Caplan moved to California, where she is currently an Associate Professor of Photography and Video at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.

“The Rancho Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes present a highly textured environment of cultural, aesthetic, and political possibility. Often called simply the Oceano Dunes, and covering eighteen miles of California’s Central Coast, they are governed by a complex of federal, state, local, private, and tribal land ownership and usage agreements. In her body of work, Lana Z Caplan explores the Dunes and finds layers of communities that have been alternately celebrated and erased; her project’s multiple narratives traverse space and time. Ruins (remains, remnants, relics, vestiges)—from broken headlights, to old movie props, to discarded clam shells—their concealment and their enshrinement, permeate the topographies and temporalities of the dunes.”Hanna Rose Shell, from the essay Vanishing and Morality in the Dunes, in the book Oceano (for seven generations), November 2023
“Whose land is it? This is probably the underlying question for Lana Z Caplan’s photodocumentary project of an expansive region of coastal California, which also represents a broader question for all of North America and the world beyond. Her specific subject is an area generally identified as Oceano, located on the Pacific coast of middle California, historically the land of the yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini (ytt) Northern Chumash, who still claim parts of this area, but also overlapping ownerships by the state of California, US Federal National Wildlife Refuge and corporate land title by the Chevron Corporation. Implicitly, the State and Federal ownership of large expanses this area is with the general public, which is part of the social tension that is created by how groups of individuals want to use, if not exploit, this same area, and who are the subjects of her book.”
Douglas Stockdale from book review in PhotoBook Journal, The Contemporary PhotoBook Magazine, March 2024

“What a book! What a place! What a palimpsest! Every page is an irresistible invitation to the visitor to stop and ponder or converse or marvel, and page to page it’s another time, another era, another subculture, another life, another confluence at the ocean’s edge, another visitation, another intimate encounter, yet all of it one, since throughout the journey she succeeds completely in capturing, creating, justifying, elaborating, endorsing the reality in her theme, that this is a special and specific place, “a high-vibration site,” a landscape of spirits. All very much alive.”
Robert Avila, Independent Arts Writer, April 2024
“But something might be said about the long wave-pounded Oceano beach with its watery dove-colored sands where the setting sun burns gold and scarlet, and the low-lying clouds spread reaches of platinum and silver with eyelets of ruby and amethyst; something might be said about the yellow sand-hill country stretching south from Oceano, changing shape as the winds change, changing color with the moods of the day.”
Ella Young from the foreword to Dunite Hugo Seelig’s book of poems Wheel of Fire (Oceano, CA: Round Table Book Company, 1936).