Lucy Raven's New Film Captures A Dam Removal In The Pacific Northwest

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Lucy Raven's New Film Tracks a Dam's Disappearance and the Birth of a River A dam removal is usually described in engineering terms: access roads, heavy equipment, sediment management. In Lucy Raven's hands, it becomes something closer to a cinematic pressure change - a moment when a contained force is allowed to move again. The American artist Lucy Raven has completed“Murderers Bar,” a 42-minute film that follows the dismantling of a dam in the Pacific Northwest and the ensuing release of water. The work traces the surge as it moves from Oregon through Northern California, continuing toward the Pacific Ocean, taking on the character of what Raven describes as a newly born river. “Murderers Bar” is the final installment in Raven's trilogy“The Drumfire,” a body of work preoccupied with matter under stress: how it is held, shaped, and then abruptly set free. The earlier chapters include“Ready Mix” (2021), filmed at a concrete plant in Idaho and structured as a meditation on industrial process, and“Demolition of a Wall (Album 1 & 2)” (2022), which focuses on shockwaves made visible in the air at an explosives testing range in New Mexico. Raven has said that water was present at the outset of“The Drumfire,” rooted in her experiments with fluid dynamics and her interest in how water has physically and politically shaped the American West. While“Ready Mix” shifted her attention to concrete, water remained embedded in the material itself. During research for“Demolition of a Wall,” she also produced shadowgrams - cameraless images made with a rapid flash - alongside high-speed video, keeping her attention on phenomena that are typically too fast or too subtle to register. A key reference point for Raven's thinking about air and motion is the 19th-century French photographer Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904). Beyond his better-known chronophotography, Marey conducted later experiments in Paris using smoke streams to visualize airflow as it met obstacles, revealing vortices and pressure systems as legible patterns. Raven has connected that lineage of image-making to her own interest in disruption that accumulates as tension before it breaks. Her turn toward dam removal came after encountering recent documentation of similar projects. A time-lapse of a reservoir draining, she has noted, compressed vast spans of time into a single unfolding image: geological history, long inhabitation, and the comparatively brief but consequential era of industrial extraction. From there, Raven began searching for a removal on a scale that could hold the complexity she wanted. She identified plans for a series of four dams along the Klamath River - described as the largest dam removal project to date - and used that context to shape“Murderers Bar.” The film's subject is not only the dramatic release of water but also the less visible labor that makes such a release possible. Raven has pointed to the extensive infrastructure required simply to access the site: before a dam can come down, roads and staging areas may need to be built to accommodate earth-moving machinery. That paradox - constructing new systems in order to dismantle old ones - sits at the center of the work's conceptual charge. In conversation with curator Candice Hopkins, Raven has also raised a linguistic problem that mirrors the cultural one: English has an abundance of terms for building infrastructure, but no widely used word that cleanly names its undoing.“Murderers Bar” steps into that gap, offering an image of deconstruction as both material event and historical reckoning. Installed this year at the Power Plant in Toronto, the film extends Raven's ongoing project of making forces visible - not as spectacle, but as a measured study of what happens when containment fails, or is finally withdrawn.

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