Recently, I’ve been enjoying art that disappears. Art that combusts, implodes, melts, burns; that’s what I’m after. Google Gustav Metzger’s singed, barely-there canvases, for example, which he burned with acid in front of the Thames, or Cai Guo-Qiang’s explosive gunpowder paintings, which proudly display war’s colorful traces—and slyly suggest the memory of its blood. Now add Lucy Raven’s Murderers Bar (2025), recently on view at Vancouver Art Gallery, to this growing list of artworks that take destruction—often prompted or shaped by military technology—as their modus operandi, as though dissolution itself were these artists’ medium.
Murderers Bar is the final installment in Raven’s three-part series The Drumfire (2020–25), a multimedia trilogy that examines the American West: its mythical position as the libidinous, amoral final frontier and its difficult reality as one of the primary sites of environmental catastrophe in the US. This installment, composed of a central forty-five-minute video work and four accompanying wall-based, abstract relief artworks, extends her ongoing project by charting the explosive removal of a dam in Oregon’s mighty Klamath River—the result of twenty years of local activism by Indigenous groups and river conservancies, and the largest dam-removal project in US history. But what might, at first view, come across as a celebration of a restorative environmentalist victory quickly turns dark. In the exhibition’s primary moving-image installation, from which the show draws its title, Raven’s technology (infrared cameras, digital modeling, drone rigs, and radar—much of which was originally created for military purposes) gradually interpolates her film to the point of near-illegibility. How, Raven seems to ask, can we make art with tools that are also used—both historically and now—to harm the people and land she aims to represent?
Installation view of Lucy Raven’s Murderes Bar at Vancouver Art Gallery, 2025. © Lucy Raven; Courtesy Lisson Gallery and the artist. Photo by Rachel Topham Photography.
When the exhibition was first announced, Raven categorized the film Murderers Bar as a Western, referencing the genre better known for saloons and shootouts than experimental video art. Allusions to this cinematic style—and filmmaking in general—are subtle, but these references serve to ground the film’s jarring, digressive style within a more approachable rubric. Raven’s film is displayed on a curved vertical screen adjacent to metal stadium seating, a setup that recalls that of a traditional movie theater while deviating from its plush comforts. The looped film follows a kind of Mad Max–esque there-and-back quest narrative, beginning at one of the Klamath River’s four still-intact dams. Raven documents the dam’s dynamite-fueled breach, following its rush of water to the sea before returning the camera’s gaze back to the dam—a route that traverses the lands of Yurok, Karuk, Klamath, Shasta, and Hupa tribes. In this way, the camera’s path obliquely confronts some of the central problems in most frontier dramas. Murderers Bar skates across territory defined by cataclysmic—and deeply Western—clashes between humans, man-made technology, and nature.
Throughout, Raven’s techniques aim to capture an American West inextricably bound to past and present conquests of Indigenous groups and their lands, a violent campaign that still reverberates in colonialist projects across the globe. To shoot Murderers Bar, Raven rigged a military drone to support a high-definition camera. This device often moves more like a fighter jet than a Steadicam, dive-bombing in and out of the Klamath at warp speed, and moving furiously west toward the Pacific. Reaching the ocean offers a form of archetypal climax for the film, one grounded in earlier frontier myths: arriving at the ocean signaled the fulfillment of manifest destiny, a nineteenth-century belief that undergirded much American westward expansion. However, when the camera—rigged to the deftly maneuvering drone—finally reaches the sea, an air-surveillance radar spirals over the footage, and loud beeps surge over the electronic score’s throbbing synths. Overlaid on an image that slowly desaturates to a dull gray, this overtly-used military technology seems to act as a kind of thesis statement for Raven’s project, aligning a peak moment of Western imperialism with technology emblematic of contemporary war.
Lucy Raven, Murderers Bar, 2025, production still. © Lucy Raven; Courtesy Lisson Gallery and the artist.
As in life, so in art: “Manifest destiny” was an ideology and system that presaged years of conflict and destruction. In Murderers Bar, arriving at the coast marks only the halfway point in the film, and much trouble follows this achievement. After reaching the ocean, the camera treks back toward the dam’s site and leads Raven into uncharted, more abstract territory. The camera surges upstream, its image shown diving in and out of the water like a salmon going back to its birthplace to die. Underwater, gray silt and air bubbles muddy the footage, and most of the frame recedes into blackness. The water rushing from the burst dam destroys the quality of the image and sound, as though capturing this event—a dam removal, and the result of many years of environmental activism—were incompatible with the image-making technology itself.
For Raven, abstraction—or near-abstraction—becomes one way of depicting the Klamath River’s dam removal, an event that encapsulates the region’s past destruction and current efforts to restore its ecosystem. In the four other wall-relief sculptures that were on view, mottled, blotchy silk stretches across aluminum bars, showcasing remnants of sand, debris, and saltwater loosened by Raven in a model simulation of a dam breach like the one she documents in Murderers Bar. In Deposition, Dam Breach 13 (2024), these unusual materials create what looks, at first, like a restrained Impressionist painting; its washes of beige sand and gray freshwater are redolent of gestural brushstrokes capturing desert landscapes or smog-drenched skies. Here, Raven’s wall reliefs posit the restorative environmental actions necessitated by problematic human intervention as incommensurate with mimetic, realist forms of representation. At the gallery, while her film played on a loop in the next room, these artworks froze in miniature the events central to Raven’s time-based media, homing in on the dam’s rupture as a final moment of visceral, transcendent reverie.
Today, the reality of the American West feels increasingly fraught, a volatility that hearkens back to its violent origins. Border conflicts, hostile natural environments, and oppressive federal forces still fuel most conversations on my edge of the Pacific: In Los Angeles in January, I watched fires destroy two thriving communities, and this summer I saw the streets empty as ICE swept the city. Raven’s Murderers Bar captures how most contemporary visual representations of the frontier landscape remain yoked to wartime technological advancement and state-sponsored violence—a crucible that looks, from the West Coast, crushingly accurate. Leaving the exhibition, I had the sense that, if Raven’s film were to continue past its run time, the fabric of the projection itself would begin to burn, fray, and vanish—and her wall reliefs would disintegrate to dirt. The most honest environmentalist artwork, it seems, might not exist at all.
