'Lucy Raven: Murderers Bar’ at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, Canada

28 October 2025

From 7 November 2025 – 22 March 2026, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery presents 'Lucy Raven: Murderers Bar’. 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 is co-commissioned and jointly acquired by The Vega Foundation and the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Find out more via The Power Plant.

Image: Lucy Raven, detail of production still from Murderers Bar, 2025. Colour video, quadraphonic sound, aluminum and plywood screen, and aluminum seating structure, 41:47. Co-commissioned and jointly acquired by The Vega Foundation and the Vancouver Art Gallery. © Lucy Raven. Courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery.