Lucy Raven, Ready Mix, 2021, installation view, WIELS, Brussels

Lucy Raven's films feature in three museum shows this summer

A selection of new and recent works by Lucy Raven can be seen in a solo exhibition at WIELS, Brussels, Belgium (Another Dull Day, until 18 August) as well as in two major group shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA (for the 2022 Whitney Biennial, As Quiet As It's Kept, until 5 September) and at Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, Arkansas, USA ('A Divided Landscape', until 25 September).

Lucy Raven’s distinct and methodical practice combines an extended and interdisciplinary enquiry into the form, function and apparatus of the moving image – whether animated, digital, mechanical or cinematic – with an ongoing appreciation for the landscapes, labours and myths surrounding the American West. Whether through audiovisual collage or phenomenological experience, Raven’s important deep-dives into systems of power, image-making and filmic history are reflected back upon by the viewer as self-generating narratives forged by their means and manner of production.

Lucy Raven (born 1977) is originally from Tucson, Arizona. She lives and works in New York City. Her work has been exhibited in solo presentations at Wiels, Brussels, Belgium (2022); Dia Chelsea, New York, USA (2021); Serpentine Galleries, London, UK (2016–17); Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, USA (2016); VOX centre de l’image contemporaine, Montreal, Canada (2015); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, USA (2014); Portikus, Frankfurt, Germany (2014); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA (2012); and Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, USA (2010).

Lucy Raven, Demolition of a Wall (Album 2), 2022, installation view, WIELS Brussels

Another Dull Day at WIELS features two ambitious film installations by Lucy Raven; a new work entitled Demolition of a Wall (Album 2) (2022) – one part of a trilogy, continuing on from the Whitney Biennial presentation – and Ready Mix (2021), which was commissioned and debuted by Dia Art Foundation, New York. Together, these pieces explore the properties of extreme pressure and material state change occurring respectively at an explosives range in New Mexico and a concrete plant in Idaho. Raven often considers the complex histories of this region’s formation and depiction, as well as its contemporary role in global commerce, communication, and development.

“Ready Mix records the churning transformation of mineral aggregates and cement binders into one of the world's most ubiquitous building materials: ready-mix concrete. The film begins with an abstraction of concrete and ends in a concrete abstraction.”

– Alexis Lowry

“I think the technological development of moving image cameras alongside the popularity of the western as a film genre has contributed to our collective imaginary, and image of the Western landscape. Those films were predicated on a fantasy of the empty West, available to be settled, that depends on a very selective mode of looking, or not looking at who and what is already living on that land.”

– Lucy Raven

Lucy Raven, Demolition of a Wall (Album 1), 2022. Installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Photograph by Ron Amstutz.

For the Whitney Biennial, Lucy Raven debuted Demolition of a Wall (Album 1) (2022), a moving-image installation that forms part of her trilogy of “Westerns.” In American cinema, the Western has traditionally celebrated the expansionist myth that the region is somehow primal or untouched. Raven, by contrast, engages with a West that—while still dramatic in its natural beauty—has been industrialised, militarised, and colonised. She filmed this work at an explosives range in New Mexico that is typically employed as a test site by the US Departments of Defense and Energy and private munitions companies. Notably, it is close to Los Alamos, a national laboratory known for its role in the development of the nuclear bomb.

Using a variety of cameras and imaging techniques, Raven captures the trajectory of the pressure-blast shockwaves that move through the atmosphere in the wake of an explosion. Drawing on film technologies designed for scientific analysis, she turns away from the Hollywood need for a climax, instead presenting the shocks as subjects in themselves.

“Raven is a master of slow time and mesmerizing close-ups contrasted with flashes of surrounding action, following the industrial alchemy by which fluid materials turn to solids and vice versa.”

– Lucy R. Lippard

Lucy Raven, Demolition of a Wall (Album 2), 2022. Installation view at Crystal Bridges, Bentonville

In A Divided Landscape, at Crystal Bridges, seven contemporary artists confront the historical and cultural narratives of the American West. From the founding of the United States to the present day, artists have employed mythic imagery—towering mountains, placid rivers, and sunlit plains—to illustrate the vast expanses and striking scenery of the American West. Themes encompass ideas of wilderness and indigeneity, interactions between humans and animals, and humans’ conquest of nature.

As well as showing Demolition of a Wall (Album 2) (2022), Raven exhibits a related new body of photographic works, a series of shadowgrams, titled Socorro! (2022), which depart from a 19th-century photographic technique developed by Ernst Mach to image shock waves in the atmosphere. They document an array of material forces mid trajectory, and the effect of these extreme pressures.

Lucy Raven, Socorro!, 2021, framed shadowgrams; silver gelatin contact prints. Installation view at WIELS, Brussels