Filmmaker and artist Lucy Raven’s multidisciplinary practice includes moving image installations, photography, drawings, and sculpture. She is presently at work on the third installment of her series The Drumfire, which takes the genre Western movie as a point of departure to explore themes of material state change, pressure, force, and cycles of violence in the (de- and re-)formation of the Western United States. In these and other works, Raven investigates hidden ideologies of industrial labor and global production circuits, ownership and displacement, the physical and economic realities, complex processes and mutability of matter (concrete, explosives, water, raw copper ore…) as well as opticality, power, and cinema history. Avoiding conventional narrative, subtly inflected abstractions and minimalism become an aperture for contemplation. With deep conceptual rigor and a uniquely adept sensitivity to the challenge of rendering a world at risk, she is rethinking and repurposing both the history and lineage of avant-garde and structuralist film and the myth and history of the American West.

photo: Ari Marcopoulos