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The Power Plant is currently closed for installation. The gallery will reopen with the new exhibitions on Friday, November 7, 2025.

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There is an industrial and photo-adjacent focus in Frei Njootli's practice, which incorporates culturally intimate materials that manifest in sculpture, regalia, performance and sound. 

Jeneen Frei Njootli’s work has been presented in many galleries, museums, and artist-run centres around the world. Recent exhibitions include: _Noise of the Flesh: Score for gina pane_, Frac des Pays de la Loire, France (2023–24); _Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination Since 1969_, curated by Candice Hopkins, CCS Bard Hessel Museum, New York (2023); _I don’t know you like that: The Bodywork of Hospitality_, UB Art Galleries, Buffalo (2022–23); _Early Days: Indigenous Art at the McMichael_, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg (2020–21); _2021 Triennial: Soft Water Hard Stone_, New Museum, New York (2021–22); _Listen Up: Northern Soundscapes_, Anchorage Museum (2021); _Where Do We Go From Here?_, Vancouver Art Gallery (2020–21); and _Nadia Belerique, Jeneen Frei Njootli, Kathy Slade_, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany (2020–21). Selected group exhibitions, biennales, and conferences include: the Anchorage Museum, Alaska (2020); the Toronto Biennial of Art (2020); The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2018–19); and the Vancouver Art Gallery (2016–18), among others. Frei Njootli holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia and a BFA from Emily Carr University. They are represented by Macaulay & Co. Fine Art in Vancouver.

Jeneen Frei Njootli lives and works in their Vuntut Gwitchin homelands, in Old Crow, Yukon. There is an industrial and photo-adjacent focus in their practice, which incorporates culturally intimate materials that manifest in sculpture, regalia, performance and sound.

For their Fall 2025 exhibition at The Power Plant, Frei Njootli shows new and recent work that rethinks how representations of Indigenous life are produced and consumed. In the work _Dreaming of new futures, greater empires have fallen_, 2024, photographs of the artist’s body being covered incrementally by snow falling in a Yukon landscape are screen-printed with epoxy resin onto large sheets of steel. The printing process leaves only the faint impression of an image, lending the work a fugitive quality that is underscored by the unstable nature of the material, which is prone to corrosion and rust. Sometimes the artist aids this process along by spraying the surface of their works with vinegar and other substances. In so doing, they keep the work in a dynamic state of impermanence as it responds to fluctuations in light and heat. In other similar works, images of a beaded baby strap made by the artist together with family members are printed onto steel. Here, cultural belongings are represented indirectly through a process of deferral, a profound shift away from the objectified way they are exhibited under glass in museum settings. In all of these works there is a sense of concealment as a means of safeguarding; erasure registered as loss but also protection. 

The artist has also used works from this series in sound performances, singing to the resonant body of steel and creating complex soundscapes with contact microphones and effects pedals. In other performances they have used caribou antlers and Ski-Doo hoods as “sound tools.” These performances enact a politics of refusal, permeating the gallery with uncontained sound, shaking the walls while leaving temporary images in accumulations of dust on the gallery floor. 

Jeneen Frei Njootli: _The skies closed themselves when we averted our gaze_ will also include textile-based sculptural works. Found objects resonant with stories of living on and from the land—a drill, a rifle, a ptarmigan wing tucked into the fold of a mitt—have been draped in tarps, hides, and floral scarves and dipped in resin, a process that allows fabric to harden and keep its shape. Items of clothing worn by the artist or close family members are similarly preserved. These are works that cite a long history of artists intentionally working with materials that evoke specific personal and cultural references, from David Hammons to James Luna. In Frei Njootli’s case, they relate directly to the community they live and work in—the self-governing Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation—speaking of ancestral memory, the transfer of knowledge systems, labour, love, kinship, and land relations. 
  
  
**About the Artist**  
**Jeneen Frei Njootli**’s work has been presented in many galleries, museums, and artist-run centres around the world. Recent exhibitions include: _Noise of the Flesh: Score for gina pane_, Frac des Pays de la Loire, France (2023–24); _Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination Since 1969_, curated by Candice Hopkins, CCS Bard Hessel Museum, New York (2023); _I don’t know you like that: The Bodywork of Hospitality_, UB Art Galleries, Buffalo (2022–23); _Early Days: Indigenous Art at the McMichael_, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg (2020–21); _2021 Triennial: Soft Water Hard Stone_, New Museum, New York (2021–22); _Listen Up: Northern Soundscapes_, Anchorage Museum (2021); _Where Do We Go From Here?_, Vancouver Art Gallery (2020–21); and _Nadia Belerique, Jeneen Frei Njootli, Kathy Slade_, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany (2020–21). Selected group exhibitions, biennales, and conferences include: the Anchorage Museum, Alaska (2020); the Toronto Biennial of Art (2020); The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2018–19); and the Vancouver Art Gallery (2016–18), among others. Frei Njootli holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia and a BFA from Emily Carr University. They are represented by Macaulay & Co. Fine Art in Vancouver. 

Jeneen Frei Njootli: The skies closed themselves when we averted our gaze

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Dreaming of new futures, greater empires have fallen, 2024.jpg

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CURATORS

The skies closed themselves when we averted our gaze

Lucy Raven (b. 1977, Tucson, Arizona) lives and works in New York City. She received a BFA in Studio Art and a BA in Art History from the University of Arizona, Tucson, in 2000, and an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, in 2008.

Lucy Raven (b. 1977, Tucson, Arizona) lives and works in New York City. She received a BFA in Studio Art and a BA in Art History from the University of Arizona, Tucson, in 2000, and an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, in 2008. Her work has been exhibited in solo presentations at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2025); Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2024); Remai Modern, Canada (2023-24); Wiels, Brussels (2022); Dia Chelsea, New York (2021); Serpentine Galleries, London (2016–17); Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio (2016); VOX centre de l’image contemporaine, Montreal (2015); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2014); Portikus, Frankfurt (2014); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2012); and Nevada Museum of Art, Reno (2010). Raven’s work appears in public collections including Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Tate Britain, London; DIA Foundation, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum, New York. Additionally, Raven’s work was included in the 2022 and 2012 Whitney Biennial, New York; 2016 Montreal Biennial; and 2018 Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh. With Vic Brooks and Evan Calder Williams, she is a founding member of 13BC, a moving-image research and production collective. Raven teaches at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York.



The Vega Foundation and The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery have co-organized an exhibition every year since 2022. Through this annual collaboration, both organizations bring their international reach to strengthen the presentation and appreciation of artists’ film and video in Canada. This year we are thrilled to present Lucy Raven’s newest work, _Murderers Bar_, 2025, co-commissioned and jointly acquired by The Vega Foundation and the Vancouver Art Gallery.

_Murderers Bar_ is the final instalment 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). These works explore themes of material states of change, pressure, force, and cycles of violence. They also investigate the development of photographic and moving image technologies and apparatuses that played an integral part in the surveying, seizure, exploitation, development, and advertisement of the “Western frontier.”

_Murderers Bar_ unfolds against the backdrop of the largest dam removal project in North American history, dismantling a monument to 20th century industrial gigantism along the Klamath River. Using multiple forms of aerial and underwater imaging, Raven’s camera keeps pace with the rush of the river as it gushes from its headwaters in Southern Oregon to the Sequoia and Redwood forests of Northern California, where it lets out into the Pacific Ocean. The river becomes the work's central focus, saturated with newly mobilized sediment following the dam's removal; its movements, diversions, and pressures—once harnessed by hydroelectric infrastructure—now released. _Murderers Bar_ reflects on how natural systems are wielded for power—and how they resist.

_Murderers Bar_ traces the propulsive release of water and sediment through the reservoir drawdown, following the Klamath River’s shifting course and ecological transformation. The river now flows freely for the first time in over a hundred years. The impressive removal project is the result of decades of activism, lawsuits, testimony, and organizing led by the Yurok Tribe, Karuk Tribe, Hoopa Valley Tribe, Klamath Tribes, and the Shasta Indian Nation, undertaken alongside a massive river restoration project dedicated to rehabilitating the habitats of numerous species including the threatened Chinook and Coho salmon.

Murderers Bar refers to a colloquial name given to a site along the Klamath River where settler violence occurred; the area was later renamed Happy Camp. In the naming and shaping of the work, Raven pinpoints the violence, abstraction, and erasure that has long dictated the use and transformation of this site.

The dam, the immense reservoir behind it, and the river now coursing through both transform through the duration of the work. _Murderers Bar_ finds its form from the release of water at a colossal scale, a fluid dynamics that has shaped the physical and the imaged/imagined Western United States. The moving image is accompanied by a dynamic, quadraphonic soundtrack scored by Raven’s frequent collaborator, the composer and percussionist Deantoni Parks.

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

This exhibition is organized and developed by The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery and The Vega Foundation. Curated by Julia Paoli, Director & Curator, The Vega Foundation, with Kate Whiteway, Assistant Curator, The Vega Foundation, in dialogue with the curatorial team at The Power Plant.
 
  
**About the Artist**  
**Lucy Raven** (b. 1977, Tucson, Arizona) lives and works in New York City. She received a BFA in Studio Art and a BA in Art History from the University of Arizona, Tucson, in 2000, and an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, in 2008. Her work has been exhibited in solo presentations at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2025); Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2024); Remai Modern, Saskatoon (2023–24); Wiels, Brussels (2022); Dia Chelsea, New York (2021); Serpentine Galleries, London (2016–17); Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio (2016); VOX centre de l’image contemporaine, Montreal (2015); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2014); Portikus, Frankfurt (2014); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2012); and Nevada Museum of Art, Reno (2010). Raven’s work appears in numerous public collections including Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Tate Britain, London; Dia Art Foundation, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum, New York. Additionally, Raven’s work was included in the 2024 Gwangju Biennale, 2022 and 2012 Whitney Biennial, New York; 2018 Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh; and 2016 Montreal Biennial. With Vic Brooks and Evan Calder Williams, she is a founding member of 13BC, a moving image research and production collective. Raven teaches at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York.

Lucy Raven: Murderers Bar

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Lucy Raven Website.png

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ORGANIZED AND DEVELOPED BY

Julia Paoli, Director & Curator, The Vega Foundation
Kate Whiteway, Assistant Curator, The Vega Foundation

Developed in dialogue with the Curatorial team at The Power Plant.

The Power Plant

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Jeneen Frei Njootli: The skies closed themselves when we averted our gaze

Lucy Raven: Murderers Bar

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