Lucy Raven: Murderers Bar | Vancouver Art Gallery

This spring, the Vancouver Art Gallery is launching the solo exhibition Lucy Raven: Murderers Bar, the first exhibition at the Gallery curated by Anthony Kiendl, the Gallery’s CEO & Executive Director, since his appointment in 2020. Lucy Raven: Murderers Bar brings new and recent works by the multidisciplinary artist best known for examining the mechanics of film, photography and video—whether animated, digital, mechanical or cinematic.

The first major presentation of Raven’s work in Vancouver and the artist’s largest exhibition in Canada to date, Lucy Raven: Murderers Bar brings together two immersive installations alongside a connected body of evocative works on silk. The exhibition will be the world premiere of Raven’s moving image installation Murderers Bar (2025), co-commissioned and jointly acquired by the Vancouver Art Gallery and The Vega Foundation. This is the first time an artwork in the Gallery’s collection will be co-owned with another institution.

“We are pleased we can realize Raven’s latest major work through this ambitious co-commission with The Vega Foundation. Lucy Raven’s powerful body of work addresses the forces of modern capitalism and their impact on our land and our communities,” says Anthony Kiendl, CEO & Executive Director of the Vancouver Art Gallery. “We believe that acquiring Murderers Bar and mounting this important exhibition will contribute to ongoing dialogues about the impact of colonization in North America and beyond. The vocabulary of her work is minimalist and structured, and builds upon an ineffable sense of awe and dread that relies upon the viewer’s own engagement and imagination.”

Murderers Bar is the final installment in Raven’s series “The Drumfire”, alongside Ready Mix (2021), Demolition of a Wall (Album 1) and Demolition of a Wall (Album 2) (both 2022). Each of these works explore themes of material state change, pressure, force, and cycles of violence in the (de- and re-) formation of the Western United States: the transformation of solid rock into concrete in Ready Mix; extreme air pressure caused by shock in Demolition of a Wall (Albums 1 and 2); and now water pressure, its build up and release in Murderers Bar.

Murderers Bar centers around the recent removal of a monumental concrete dam along the Klamath River, which stretches from its headwaters in southern Oregon to the Sequoia Redwood Forest of Northern California, where it lets out into the Pacific Ocean. The dam’s removal—after more than 100 years, and after decades of activism, testimony, and lawsuits by Indigenous communities including the Klamath, Yurok, and Karuk—is part of the biggest dam removal project in American history, undertaken alongside a significant river restoration intended to return the historic habitat of the threatened Chinook and Coho salmon. The dam, the immense reservoir behind it, and the river now coursing through both, are inexorably transformed through the duration of the work. Murderers Bar, in turn, finds its form from the release of water at a colossal scale.

Murderers Bar is presented as a large-scale sculptural installation with a dynamic, quadraphonic soundtrack produced in partnership with Raven’s frequent musical collaborator, composer and percussionist Deantoni Parks. Together, the installation’s sound and images create a sublime environment in which the viewer becomes the primary protagonist in the space.

A second immersive work can be found in the Gallery’s rotunda: the kinetic light installation Casters X-2 + X-3 (2021). Featuring four wall mounted gyroscopic sculptures made of galvanized steel, the cavernous rotunda, at the heart of the building and at the entrance of the exhibition, will be transformed by the slow-moving circles of light projecting in a mesmerizing multi-hour choreography.

Also on view are a series of Depositions, large-scale works on silk born from Raven’s experimentations in modeling dam breaches in preparation for filming for Murderers Bar. On a dock in Long Island City, Raven reformed a large, watertight container into a chamber that could be filled and drained. Within it, she shaped earthen dam-like forms from dirt, soil and cement, then filled the “reservoir” created behind each structure with water pumped from the East River. Before each of these forms was built and later breached, silk organza was stretched along the sides and bottom of the chamber, creating the substrate for these new works. The resulting “drawings” form ethereal impressions. They demonstrate how material that endures cycles of pressure can build up, be released and turn land into a spectral image of landscape.