Above: Lucy Raven, Murderers Bar (2025), video installation. Photo courtesy Lisson Gallery and the artist.
Lucy Raven: Murderers Bar
Text by Anthony Kiendl
1.
The exhibition Murderers Bar at Vancouver Art Gallery takes its name from a newly commissioned work—the last chapter in a series of videos called “The Drumfire” by New York-based artist Lucy Raven. The work Murderers Bar (2025) features a single-channel video projected vertically on a sculptural installation in the gallery space. Created through 2023 to 2025, the video centers around the recent removal of a century-old concrete gravity dam along the Klamath River in Northern California—the biggest dam removal project in American history. These depictions provide the action and context for a meditation on ideas of a broader scale and duration: Geologic and human-imposed forces, pressures, and changes of material state, especially as they relate to cycles of violence in the centuries-long transformation of western North America both literally and symbolically in the popular imagination.
The exhibition features previous and related works---a selection from Raven’s series Depositions (2024), and Casters X-2 + X-3 (2021)—that provide context within her practice, and a broader appreciation of her ongoing investigation and visual language. The arc of these works reveals the intermingling of nature and technology, the frequent interrelation of military and entertainment applications, and the impact of these forces on lived experience through the formation of modernity. This world premiere of the new work, co-commissioned by Vancouver Art Gallery and the Vega Foundation, is the first major presentation of Raven’s work in Vancouver and the artist’s largest exhibition in Canada to date.
Taken together, the works in this exhibition provide a timely glimpse into the expanding field of Raven’s vision—a push and pull between human intervention and more-than-human forces of nature and the physical world. It explores objectivity, subjectivity and perception—from individual and discrete elements of history, technology and the popular imagination—to the broader sweep of geologic and physical forces that define experience over millennia.
2.
The story of the Klamath River in the late 19th century, on the edge of the Pacific Northwest, revolves around the progressive colonization of the land, and the dispossession of Indigenous tribes including the Hoopa, Karuk, Klamath, Modoc and Yurok. This included gold prospecting, forestry, and then beginning in 1903 dam creation and flooding that would support the electrification of the West. It culminates with the re-appropriation and destruction of the dam by a coalition including Indigenous people and environmental activists in the first quarter of the 21st century.
Murderers Bar depicts a carefully engineered detonation at the base of the massive human-made structure, releasing waters that flooded these lands over a century ago with the creation of the dam. The deluge from the breach literally and conceptually reveals multiple layers of time and history. The drained reservoir reveals standing petrified trees—as if frozen in time—that have not been exposed to sunlight for over a century. The camera, flying metres above the landscape, tracks the tumult tumbling towards the ocean kilometers downstream. At its destination, the muddy torrent coalesces with the Pacific Ocean. Turning back, the camera returns upstream to the reservoir. Revisiting this point of origin, the viewer experiences the loop repeat from beginning to end. This déjà vu brings with it a sense of the uncanny, and all that that encompasses—the awesome and overwhelming aspect of nature’s power, human experience in the face of the sublime, and an apprehension of scale in the engulfing expanse of geologic time. In this infinite loop we are reminded of the cyclical nature of violence beyond this exact moment in the summer of 2023, to a broader expanse of time encompassing years, decades and beyond, and all that they contain—the multiple pasts and histories of modernity, colonization and resistance.
2.
Casters X-2 + X-3 (2021) is composed of two wall-mounted mechanical apparatuses installed in the Gallery’s multi-story Rotunda. Each apparatus holds a spotlight projecting a cleaved circle of light. Their movement is carefully and independently choreographed to move at a steady and controlled pace. The lights probe the architectural space—describing it—by highlighting the Romanesque contours of the Rattenbury-designed Provincial Courthouse (constructed 1907-11) in which the Gallery is now housed.
These lighting mechanisms afford the viewer numerous visual and conceptual associations. As the spotlights quietly roam and crisscross the space, one may think of prison yard searchlights, or other technological forms of surveillance, as well as theatrical spotlights and performance spaces. Commencing in the late 19th centuries spotlights have been utilized by the military and the entertainment industries alike. The clinical operation of Casters—the movement of which is purposeful and perhaps indifferent to the viewer—connotes ideas of artificial life and robotics.
While electricity is invisible, lighting became a symbol of its full force—which changed human experience of life dramatically in the late 19th Century. No longer subjected to diurnal rhythms of night and day, humans banished nature with artificial light and control of the environment to an extent never before seen. This was part of a complex of technological development that supported myriad effects on the environment including hydro-electric dams and telecommunications, all leading to today’s technologically-mediated environment a little over a century later.
3.
The Depositions (2024) are a series of non-representational “images” mounted and installed on wood and aluminum armatures that exist as a form of “drawings” or “proto photographs” — and yet are neither. As the title indicates, Raven created these forms through causing a medium to be “deposited” on a surface. They are a palimpsest recording the event of their own creation. Raven discovered these forms by modelling the flooding of a miniaturized dam before and in preparation for the filming of Murderers Bar. On a dock in Long Island City, Raven adapted a large container into a watertight chamber that could be filled and drained. Within it, she shaped earthen dam-like forms with dirt, soil and cement, then filled the “reservoir” created behind each of them with water pumped from the East River. Before each of these forms was built and later breached from water pressure amassed behind them, silk organza was stretched along the sides and bottom of the chamber, creating the substrate for these new works. They share elements of a quasi-photographic nature, in which mineral elements are deposited on the silk surface, and with the application of water, an image is “drawn by nature” through the implementation of a mechanical apparatus. The formal qualities of these objects—in luscious and soft hues of umber and sienna—are reminiscent of early 19th century photography. But any similarity with photography ends there—these are markers of material elements in flux over time, and do not carry a photograph’s surplus of representational detail and reproducibility.
Perhaps a better analogy for the Depositions is that of drawing. A graphite-like medium is applied to a surface through novel means, to create unique, singular patterns that evoke landscapes, oceans, clouds or other organic forms. They could perhaps be considered automatic non-representational drawings, in which the results and forms are surrendered to chance and natural forces.
Regardless of the process of their creation, the Depositions form poetic, spectral evocations of another world, speaking to broader forces of experience such as geology and the natural environment, even more broadly the physics of the universe. By turns celestial and terrestrial—heavenly and abject—these forms defy simple categorization and readings.
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