Lucy Raven: Murderers Bar

The exhibition Murderers Bar at the Vancouver Art Gallery takes its name from a newly commissioned work – the last chapter in a trilogy of moving image installations called The Drumfire by New York-based artist Lucy Raven. The work Murderers Bar (2025) features an ensemble of sculptural elements and a video projected vertically on a tall free standing aluminum structure in the gallery space. Created through 2023 to 2025, the video centres 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, 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 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 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 – the push and pull between human intervention and 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 have defined experience over millennia.

Organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery and curated by Anthony Kiendl, CEO and Executive Director, with Siobhan McCracken Nixon, Associate Curator.

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

Presenting Sponsor: Bruno J. Wall.