Lucy Raven: Murderers Bar

Lucy Raven: Murderers Bar is the first major presentation of work by multidisciplinary artist Lucy Raven in Vancouver and the artist’s largest exhibition in Canada to date.  

Based in New York, Raven (b. 1977) works in installation, photography, video, drawing and sculpture to examine historic and contemporary representations and narratives of the American West. 

The exhibition takes its name from Raven’s newest work Murderers Bar (2025), the third installment in a series of moving image installations and related works called The Drumfire. Co-commissioned by the Vancouver Art Gallery and The Vega Foundation, it features an ensemble of sculptural elements and a video, projected vertically on a tall, free-standing aluminum structure in the gallery space. Created between 2023 and 2025, the video centres around the recent removal of a century-old, concrete dam along the Klamath River in Northern California.

The dam’s removal after more than one hundred years—after decades of activism, testimony and lawsuits by Tribal Nations including the Yurok Tribe, Karuk Tribe, Klamath Tribe and Shasta Indian Nation—is part of the biggest dam removal project in American history, undertaken alongside a massive river restoration intended to restore the historic habitat of the threatened Chinook and Coho salmon.

The exhibition also presents previous and related works—including a selection from Raven’s series Depositions (2024) and Casters X-2 + X-3 (2021)—that provide further context to her practice and a broader appreciation of her ongoing investigations 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. 

Together, the works in this exhibition provide a timely glimpse into the expanding field of Raven’s vision—the push and pull between human intervention and the more-than-human forces of nature and the physical world. The exhibition explores objectivity, subjectivity and perception, from individual and discrete elements of history, technology and the popular imagination to the broader sweep of geological and physical forces that define experience over millennia. 

This exhibition is part of the 2025 Capture Photography Festival Featured Exhibitions Program.

Murderers Bar is co-commissioned and jointly acquired by the Vancouver Art Gallery and The Vega Foundation.