The Power Plant

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.