Lucy Raven Unleashes the Power of a Dam

From the gliding perspective of a drone, we encounter the Copco Number 1 Dam on California’s Klamath River: a monumental feat of earthwork and environmental engineering. The hulking concrete mass holds back an entire lacustrine ecosystem on one side and oversees a mostly dry riverbed on the other. This infrastructure, along with its surrounding ecology, is the protagonist of Lucy Raven’s newest video installation, Murderers Bar (2025), a co-commission by the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Vega Foundation. The single-channel, 42-minute video is currently on view in an eponymous exhibition at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, where it is displayed on a concave screen and viewable from spare bleacher seating (as is characteristic of Raven’s installations). Aptly shot in portrait orientation, Murderers Bar narrates the moment at which our protagonist undergoes a life change.

The video shifts perspective and scale as a small raft ferries explosives through a tunnel into the dam’s core, where engineers proceed to deftly prepare and place them. We are panoramic again: the humans are mere dots on a cliff, watching the fruits of their labour from a safe distance.

An anticipatory silence, and then a deep boom: decades of accumulated water and sediment gush through, the force of a reservoir spilling out in an instantaneous release of brute pressure. Airborne again, we trace the river’s restored headwaters as they advance over the diminishingly dry riverbed, covering bends, crevices and rocks for the first time in a century. After a few minutes, the waters are reunited with the Pacific Ocean. As riverine and oceanic waters merge into one vast, saturated frame, our sense of scale is again collapsed. Then, the video’s perspective turns and backtracks upstream, the camera skimming the revived river surface, punctuated by dips into the turbulent waters below.

Murderers Bar is the third and final instalment in Raven’s film trilogy ‘The Drumfire’ (2021–25), which explores how forceful applications of earth, air and water have created and recreated the landscape of the American West. Seemingly the most technically and geographically ambitious of the three, it homes in on the unjustifiable divide between construction and destruction, natural and artificial. Is the demolition of a dam not also the composition of a new landscape? Is the ‘renaturalized’ river and ecosystem not also synthetic?

When we finally glimpse the once dammed side again, the lakebed is drained, deformed, grotesque. The dam removal project, completed in 2024, was an effort to replenish salmon populations that formed a cornerstone of the regional food supply and thus restore the river basin ecology. It was the culmination of decades of negotiations between local Indigenous nations, state governments and several private organizations. Seen in this context, many will reasonably read into Murderers Bar a hefty constellation of messages concerning hubristic efforts to overcome nature in the physical and symbolic making of the American West, or the long-standing commingling of the fight for environmental justice and Indigenous rights. Or, perhaps most pertinently, the murkier aspects of efforts to right past wrongs.

Raven revels in the inherently unresolvable nature of such quandaries, avoiding a neat exaltation of repair and restoration, let alone a sense of justice or closure. Eschewing limpidity, she offers a muddier, sediment-logged case study of one of our many acts of human folly. Her unconventional portrait is made both more vivid and more complex by her decision to repeatedly alternate between spatial scales and perspectives; temporal and geographical visions of the dam; and river extent and ocean expanse. We cannot fully know the downstream effects of our latest experiments in the Klamath – or any act of environmental engineering – but we may adopt a critical, alert curiosity as we watch its future flow.

Lucy Raven’s ‘Murderers Bar’ is on view at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, until 22 March 2026. The work is also included in ‘Lucy Raven: Rounds’, on view at the Barbican Centre, London, until 4 January 2026, and at the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston, from 20 May 2026 to 6 September 2026

_{Main image: Lucy Raven, Murderers Bar, 2025, colour video, quadraphonic sound, aluminium and plywood screen, aluminium seating structure, dimensions variable. Courtesy: the artist and Lisson Gallery; photograph: LF Documentation}