Working across mediums including photography, video, sculpture, and installation, artist Lucy Raven explores the construction and unmaking of the American West in work that investigates the ways we both mythologize and exploit its landscapes. Lucy Raven: Level Distance features three bodies of work from The Drumfire (2020-2025), a multimedia project challenging the Western landscape genre by examining the effects of pressure, destruction, and reconstitution on the landscapes of the West. Two of these bodies of work consider the damaging impact of blast testing on the Western deserts: Photograms, made at a ballistics lab in New Mexico – records of the explosion of small projectiles on photosensitive paper, and Particles, drawings that depict the percussive movement of shock waves. Both the Photograms and the Particles drawings began in the aftermath of Raven’s production of the moving image works Demolition of a Wall (Album 1) and Demolition of a Wall (Album 2), shot on location at an explosives range in Socorro, New Mexico. As Raven writes, those works, “explore the pressure of shock waves from multiple offscreen detonations across a field of desert that has been used as a bombing and test range throughout the 20th and into the 21st century.” Two other works are part of Raven’s project Depositions, which emerged from the removal of four dams along the Klamath River. Made by recreating a dam break in a container lined with silk, the pieces are embedded with displaced sediment. The sediment creates images that resemble mountain ranges and valleys, evoking representations of the West dating back to the 19th century. The Depositions stand as a record of the ways that pressure applied to land can, eventually, be released, reshaping land and landscape.
