-- Artist statement
In 2012, I was invited to China to create and install work for a museum exhibition. I was living in Brooklyn at the time. Seeing people sleeping on the subway was not something new, however the subway sleepers in New York were often drunk, homeless, or pretending to sleep to avoid eye contact with fellow riders. During the summer I spent in Beijing, I learned that many workers traveled three to six hours every day, each way, for work.
The subway in Beijing seemed to be a borrowed space in which many riders might be getting the only sleep they would get that day, sometimes standing propped up by the surrounding crowd. I made these portraits of the subway sleepers in Beijing as tintypes, rendering the digital into the historic form, referencing 19th century death portraits as a meditation on the life of the modern worker, the daily commute, and the toll it takes on the worker. The images are printed at life scale on 8x10” metal plates, the heads about the same size as my head.
Lana Z Caplan works across various media, including single-channel films or videos in essay form, interactive installations, video art, and photography. Her works are inspired by particular locations and sub-cultural notions of utopia – where one person’s utopia is often another’s undoing. Her work explores the implications of the social landscape on the physical landscape, unearthing buried or forgotten histories, and the transformative experiences images and media have on our psyche.
More information: lanazcaplan.com
