'Lucy Raven: Murderers Bar' at Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada

7 April 2025

From 18 April – 28 September 2025, Vancouver Art Gallery presents ‘Lucy Raven: Murderers Bar’, the first major presentation of work by multidisciplinary artist Lucy Raven in Vancouver and the artist’s largest exhibition in Canada to date.

The exhibition takes its name from Raven’s newest work Murderers Bar (2025), the third instalment in a series of moving image installations and related works called The Drumfire. Co-commissioned by the Vancouver Art Gallery and The Vega Foundation, it features an ensemble of sculptural elements and a video, projected vertically on a tall, free-standing aluminium structure in the gallery space. Created between 2023 and 2025, the video centres around the recent removal of a century-old, concrete dam along the Klamath River in Northern California—the biggest dam removal project in American history.

The exhibition also presents previous and related works—including a selection from Raven’s series Depositions (2024) and Casters X-2 + X-3 (2021)—that provide further context to her practice and a broader appreciation of her ongoing investigations and visual language. Together, the works in this exhibition provide a timely glimpse into the expanding field of Raven’s vision—the push and pull between human intervention and the more-than-human forces of nature and the physical world. The exhibition explores objectivity, subjectivity and perception, from individual and discrete elements of history, technology and the popular imagination, to the broader sweep of geological and physical forces that define experience over millennia.

Find out more via Vancouver Art Gallery.

Image: Lucy Raven, Murderers Bar, 2025, production still from moving image installation, © Lucy Raven, Courtesy of the Artist and Lisson Gallery