Lucy Raven: Murderers Bar
Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC - To Sep 28
New York–based artist Lucy Raven’s exhibition Murderers Bar, set on a site on the Klamath River in Northern California, is comprised of three works—Casters X-2 + X-3 (2021), Depositions (2024) and the 2025 work from which this exhibition takes its name. Though the works differ from each other in medium, all are representative of the artist’s interest in “examining the mechanics of film, photography and video—whether animated, digital, mechanical or cinematic.”
Installed in the gallery’s rotunda, Casters X-2 + X-3 consists of four slow-moving gyroscopic spotlights designed to both illuminate and, in some instances, distort the pillars, cornices, reliefs and railings that animate this neo-classical passageway. The large-scale wall works that make up Depositions were born from Raven’s contained experiments in modelling dam breaching, in preparation for her filming of Murderers Bar. Before constructing her dam-like forms with soil and cement, she lined her watertight container with silk organza. The impressions registered on these silks allow for an uncanny suite of drawings—landscapes at once ravaged and pristine.
Co-commissioned and jointly acquired by the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Vega Foundation, Murderers Bar is a mesmerizing 42-minute video projected onto a massive vertical screen. Via helicopter and drone photography, viewers are propelled down the Klamath River, eventually to a 100-year-old dam where preparations are being made to blow it open. Once the dam explodes, the camera follows the silt-ridden effluent to the Pacific Ocean, whereupon it turns around and viewers are led upriver (sometimes from the perspective of a returning salmon), past the dam and, most horrifically, the cavernous grey-black valley where there was, until recently, a sleeping lake.
