The Enlightenment understanding of nature and its “properties” structures material legacies that are a product of colonial relations, its forms of imagining, and practical purification and the policing of categories. Such carceral forms are both a means to property and to the disavowal of the colonial encounter with difference.
A Prefatory Note
Since landscape has been a primary site through which unilateral violence has served to overwrite a multiplicity of differences, it seems essential that an ethical engagement with artistic projects critically geared toward landscape remain stubbornly open to difference, to contradiction, or to uncertainty. Such openness requires thinking through the convergence of differences without forcing dissonance to assimilate to a dominant order.1 Or, such openness requires that we be willing to “wonder before judging,” that we recursively defer and evade “judgment in favor of anticipation,” willingly suspending our aims by committing to a critical engagement built up through what Mary Kelly calls “a careful transcription of the signifying system of the work,”2 something we might otherwise colloquially call “thick description.”
If, as Jose Esteban Muñoz avers, it is indeed “a problem to simply make claims about the world without really describing it,” and if such assertions tend to “claim a certain knowledge of the world, a knowledge that fixes things,” then a committed openness to difference brings us more solidly into contact with the unstable dynamism of ideas, and with the inherently speculative dimension of the artwork, underscoring for us its irreducibly polyvocal instantiations of meaning. Thick description can persuade us to slow the appetitive drive of interpretive activity, and insist that we take our time, “or use time itself, outside of naturalistic teleology, and describe our affective field of perception,” which helps us to do what Muñoz calls “unfolding the world.”3 For Kelly, a movement toward interpretation grounded in a slow, successive exploration of the “materiality of the signifier” can mitigate “the quick fix of the signified and the headlong rush to the sign,” and bring us into an ethical practice of observation, one which understands looking not only to be essential, but that understands “this looking as a form of listening”—a deeply synaesthetic practice.4
The deferral and disruption of the “quick fix” Kelly seeks to effect depends upon interruption, depends upon the interruptive work of a break in the flow of a chain, which, in Muñoz, “helps me think about that moment as moment, … where my mind is still in a productive state of contemplation, not a moment of integration.”5 I want, in what follows, to think through that break—to consider how art in its exhibitional form can instantiate such breaks—and to work toward a sense of artistic thought as that thought is enacted through art’s objects by way of Kelly and Muñoz’s phenomenological sense of thick description. Such a method may well illuminate the convergences and divergences unfolding between a set of parallel acts in contemporary art critically engaged with the landscape, and the tasks to which we submit its meanings. Part 1 will consider exhibitions by Lucy Raven, and Part 2 by Zoe Leonard.
Dam Breach
I am sitting on the floor opposite three widescreen televisions, hung to form a single horizon line on the top floor of the Lisson Gallery’s 67 Lisson Street address in London, looking at Lucy Raven’s video installation Dam Breach LIC (2024). I am seeing this work at lunchtime, which means that the video’s digressive flow is garlanded with the joyful cries of schoolchildren in a nearby playground. Each of the three monitors display a stationary camera’s static frame, offering a supervening view of sand, mud, sod, and silt in varying states of admixture with briefly stilled, or continuously flowing, water.
These elements appear to be contained within a trough, hemmed in by bulbous blue or white sheeting, and in each of these three monitors, water appears to enter or to have already aggregated in the left-hand third of the frame. Much of the space to the right is taken up by varying compositions of mud, sand, compacted and aerated earth continuously inseminated by the insistently wayward motions of water. In this way, the fixedness of the camera’s frame, and the wooden trough’s rigid echo of the work’s tripartite serial structure, are traversed by a spillage of lassitude, by effluence and watery undulation. If Raven’s modular installation invokes the strict grammars of minimalism, with its regnant order of autonomous sequence, then in Dam Breach structure and substance, form and content intersect in a coagulation of quadrilateral abstractions with strange figuration.
Dam Breach unfurls, in essence, as a continuous interplay between rigidity and fluidity, understood as two interanimating dynamics that burrow through Raven’s work. This same dynamic is active in the temporality of the work, as the videos’ iterative accumulations inflect the stolid, processional rhythms of the abstract grid with the successive effects of fluid, dynamic, and recursive change. Raven’s flattened frames evoke the austerity of evidentiary practice, yet their contents evoke other tendencies: the sedimentary activity of earthwork, the liquid textures of pigment, the irregular shape(s) of landscape, and the improvisational skeins of Jackson Pollock’s abstract expressions. For if Raven’s titular “LIC” connotes Long Island City, then the terraformed solidity and the sudden subsidence of this banked, silted earth in these test beds also evokes the shifting edges of the island on which her trough sits. If each video describes the experimental creation of ground, of earth, of space, then severalty6 courses underneath the structure of this grid, these tanks, and this provisional land.
In Dam Breach, something unguent, something unstable and undulating, frothy and fetid, furtive and surfaced cuts across every stricture of the proper, and courses between these three looped frames. Raven’s screens connect the subdural and superficial changes in base elements to the elaboration of surface detail into the rhetorical shape of signs. Her elevated, abstracted vantage point confers upon this uncertain mixture the symbolic coherence of a representation: the camera’s suspension transforming transversal and diegetic activity into pictorial effect. I would venture that in this transubstantiation of process into representation, we are shown a “gap between meaning and the Real,” an incommensurable disjuncture between activity and image.7 This, I think, is the constitutive abstraction that names the underlying violence of the category “landscape” within these elements of Raven’s work.8
Dam Breach is one essential element within Raven’s exhibition “Depositions,” a term whose varying inflections organize the works in this show.9 The recursive nature of its loops reveals the various scenes to be experiments, which are themselves marked by periodic annotations: Deposition, Dam Breach #20, Deposition, Dam Breach #16, Deposition, Dam Breach #27, and so on. These annotations inflect the installation simultaneously with markers of scientific experimentation and with the whimsical iteration of an experimental riff. Raven’s structured digressions invoke both science and art, order and deviation, retention and spillage in a progressive set of convergences between processes of composition, dissolution, ossification, and collapse. Within this expressive structure, seriality works to delimit sequence, even as flow and spillage work to suffuse, to exceed, to interpenetrate.
The space of appearance in Dam Breach is made over into a site of inscription, a theatrical space organized by the continuous presence of only partially legible acts and events. In each frame, the test bed container becomes a screen endowed with the receptiveness of a surface built for signs, symbols, suggestions of figuration, and allegories of place echoed in the contracted space of composition. Considered from this elevated vantage, Raven’s test beds are consonant with the flatbed picture plane10—but I would add that in their thick depth, in the opacity of their cumulative densities, they historicize the contingent processual dimensions of appearance by which a figure comes to be read “against” its ground. The phenomenal absence of legible signs prompts a fevered reading of ground as figure, as site of figuration, so that, as Fred Moten writes, “background’s status as ground is vulnerable to a transformative force emerging from the very ‘representations’ for whom it is a precondition.”11
The palimpsestic space of each Dam Breach—to borrow from Georges Didi-Huberman—does not “seem to lend [itself] to being raised up … into something figurative,” and instead “seems to defy comprehension as a recognizable image.” The base matter of each “breached dam” is, in that sense, deeply thingly, irreducibly there and yet “outside the bounds of scansion or any sort of narrativity,” as Didi-Huberman writes of the stain in the Turin Shroud. The base thingliness of these viscous grounds, in turn, seems to exist “between the spatium (the background in question) and the pure surface,” in a liminal position that suspends, in simultaneity, the unrelieved condition of structural subordination with the absolute isolation of unfettered exposure.12
If background becomes an active site of interest only in its dynamic, dialectical relation to what may be figured upon its surface, then Dam Breach’s back/ground forces the question: How to look at the thingly opacity of space? To borrow from Didi-Huberman, this raw matter seems to instantiate “that very place where figuration abolishes itself.” And yet, in a paradox brought on by the very rawness of base matter, and by its exteriority to the differentiations of the sign, “the effacement of all figuration in this trace is itself the guarantee of a link, of authenticity.” The prelinguistic rawness of base matter attests to the sheer there-ness of a body, to the primacy of the Real, so that “if there is no figuration it is because contact has taken place. The noniconic, nonmimetic nature of this stain guarantees its indexical value.”13
We are therefore in the presence of an inarticulate it when Dam Breach proffers us its resistant, earthy opacity, in the space of “the elemental,” which is that of “multitudes and routes rather than singular root.”14 In each iteration, Raven gives us the progressive disarticulation of distinction, in sequence, her spillages of hybrid matter enacting a kind of concatenation that progressively dissolves clear differentiations into a slurry of inchoate speech.
Depositions
How, then, might this suite of works be understood as a set of “depositions,” the title conferred upon this exhibition as a whole, comprising not only the tripartite video installation Dam Breach, but three wafer-thin silk scrims (part of a series of fifteen) that formerly lined the innards of Raven’s test beds, filtering sediment from the slurry that swilled beneath the surface of her experimental compositions? In its common definitions, the term “deposition” marks a convergence of law, geology, finance, and politics—it describes testimony produced outside the physical space of the court, but within the court’s jurisdiction; it describes acts and processes of laying something down, or the accumulation of deposits; and it describes the act of removing a figure from a position of authority, as in a king or president.
A deposition thus marks the site at which evidence of prior action is inscribed, legibly, in public space, whether as a function of juridical practice, financial transaction, geological process, or political struggle. A deposition attests to completed action, through the legibility with which that action has altered form. A deposition is at once a process and a result—an activity in historical sequence, and a product of historical sequence, a thing at once durational and delimited, continuous and finite. Depositions, and indeed Raven’s Depositions, are instances of parallax. Parallax names the intersection of utterly contradictory, and thus irreducible, perspectives converging at one site—a train appearing to move while stationary—just as a deposition names a continuous process through a term that delimits a completed act. In Raven’s material and conceptual engagement with landscape, fixity and delimitation are seen in their simultaneous convergence with their opposites: excess, and change. Indeed, I would argue that in Raven’s engagement with the definition of landscape (understood as a simultaneously scientific, commercial, and political act) claims mark instances in which “there is no rapport” between two or more disjunct things that, while “closely connected, … are, as it were, on opposite sides of a Moebius strip.”15 The question follows then: What might these art objects depose?
Each of Raven’s three “translucent panels,” to borrow a phrase from her gallery’s press release, has been clasped and stretched within thin wide wood and aluminum armatures, which stretch their pliable sepia-toned surfaces into the seamless extension of a superwide screen.16 They are clinched, braced, floated in a declamatory embrace, their edges near seamlessly proffered to the room in what Didi-Huberman might call “an ostentation of the object.”17 They are also silkscreens, their surfaces inscribed with the finite result of varying processes of osmosis, of mineral deposits, and of liquid’s inscription and evaporation. The unvarnished finish of their wooden frames at once evokes the stretching of canvas constitutive of the ground of painting, and the sluice boxes within which goldminers would sieve river water and sift liquid for gold. In either practice—the craft of painting or of mining—deposition and value are bound up in the sedimentation of surfaces with legible traces subject to arbitrary cultural valuation. The silken surface of Raven’s panels is bared in a submission of that surface to aesthetic and lexical judgement, to a reading and feeling for the presence of value, in a process that refigures nature—whether pigments, sign, or mineral trace—into possessable bounty.
It seems noteworthy, at this juncture, to recall that Carleton Watkins, a canonical figure in the field of American landscape photography, lastingly remembered for his iconic and immense photographic prints of the Yosemite Valley,18 was in fact first paid to produce photographs for use in the arbitration of property disputes over the Guadalupe Mine in San Jose, California.19 If a mine marks the site at which the chemistry of photographic production (with all its silvers and metals) intersects with the rapacious advances of Manifest Destiny, then as Kathryn Yusoff writes, it “can be understood as part of the extraction and expansion dynamic of colonialism, whereby bodies geo-coded as Black, brown, and native came to represent the frontier space of that geographical movement.”20 In this way, the inchoate stains that structure each of Raven’s sepia-toned Depositions can be read in the light of their sedimentation by the ongoing project of Indigenous dispossession.
I note the foregoing to highlight the historical continuities at play in the material and symbolic dimensions of Raven’s Depositions, and to underscore the way that the material facture of her work historicizes the broader aesthetic and economic categories of landscape to which her artistic practice responds. If, in the settler-colonial context of the American West, we can say that not only property, but also the “economic unit” we call land is theft,21 then the elaboration of mined soil into the abstraction of exchange value describes the relation between Dam Breach and the Depositions series, just as that itinerary approximates the modern evolution of what Denis Cosgrove calls “the landscape idea”:
The landscape idea … was locked into an individualist way of seeing which found technical expression in modes of visual composition directed to the distanced eye and which posited a human relationship with the land and nature based increasingly on exchange values. It is a way of seeing which separates subject and object, giving lordship to the eye of a single observer.22
Each of Raven’s silk scrims is itself the “ground” of Dam Breach—the silk literally lined the beds, serving as a base for the videos’ successive watery acts of figuration. In that sense, the elaboration of that series of muddy mixtures into a set of “images” fit for display recapitulates some of the constitutive abstractions that enable “a way of seeing which separates subject and object, giving lordship to the eye of a single observer.”
The transcendent and projective space of landscape has always been innervated by the dictates of governance, trade, property, by myths of individual sovereignty and autonomy, and the mobilizing abstractions of national identity. Raven’s work, and its associated language, does not simply depict but rather manifests these continuing historical inheritances, and their contemporary intersections. For instance, her use of the term “panel” reconnects the aesthetic expression of picturing both to the scale of construction, in which panels are planar wall and slab elements that subdivide built space, and to the coding of architecture, in which paneling determines the texture of a building’s structural supports, as well as to the evaluative function of panels as bodies of persons charged with the authority of judgement. In Raven’s triptych of “depositions” in this show, these panels are made over into relics of material experiment, images of nature in its palimpsestically temporal form, and commercial lots in the free market of art, submitted to their viewers for summary judgement.
In these ways, Raven’s painterly “depositions” are both a product and an activity of witness that collapse varying temporalities of change into the schematic structure of shape. Perhaps we can think of their stained surfaces as distillations of varying processes in which differences intermingle across category, across thresholds of liquid and solid, across closed and opened borders. They are synchronic, in the sense of instantaneity—in the interstice of sudden, stark, indexical impressions—and they are diachronic, in that they are saturated and layered by the successive longitudinal process of change over time. They are temporally complex objects that result equally from acts of impression and absorption, or from accident and intention, or from removal and reproduction. Perhaps we can say that Raven’s absorbent screens suspend, in complex and fruitfully contradictory simultaneity, the orders of (the) proof, the document, the drawing, the photograph, and the silkscreen, and that it is such dissonant simultaneities as these that course through the work’s weave.
I would argue that Raven’s Depositions historicize the production of “the landscape idea” as a possessable and projective image space, one ostensibly unmoored from its contingent material and historical entanglements, and transformed into a “pure space” of representation, with landscape reconceived as a screen marked by events legible to the propertied subject. Yet it is not only sediment that registers. There is, throughout these Depositions, also the palpably vanished presence of inchoate and undulating bodies in the plural, even as Dam Breach offers us an image of their scatological dehiscence, and of their viscous coupling. Just as each Dam Breach test reveals the coupling of various elements into new, varyingly stable compounds as the basis of its act of figuration, so each Deposition registers the passage of miscegenated mixtures compacted into the shape of bodies, of earth in continuous undulation.
The “depositions” are queered, polyvocal, polysemous instances of intersection, accumulation, evaporation, inscription, and accident converging at differing rates within the same delimited space. Not only are the works themselves a series, but they are internally multiples in their own individuated forms: plural, dynamic, porous, not fixed, not stable, not singular. Raven’s “depositions” cannot be recuperated by any exclusionary claims to the purity of a single medium, even as they reflexively interrogate the condition of possibility for documents to act as facts, for evidence to attest to time’s agency, for process to reduce to image, for abstraction to complicate representation, or for figuration to ratify and contradict its referential ground.
Perhaps, in this sense, it is the notional stricture of category, the hermetic seal of genre, and the autonomy of representational form that is deposed in the break between Dam Breach and these Depositions.
Murderers Bar
If a certain insistently relational energy is apparent within the structure of Dam Breach, and throughout Raven’s Depositions, then I would argue that we can and must think of these works in dynamic relation to Raven’s film Murderers Bar (2025), since each of these works is both materially and conceptually entangled with the others.
The film Murderers Bar begins at the precipice of the Copco Number 1 Dam, on the Klamath River, in Siskiyou County, California, and it begins in a plosive and discombobulated kind of hybridity, as the sounds of a tremulous, vibrating thrum echo in simultaneity with a computer-generated image that spins vertically backward through 180 degrees, against its horizontal axis, flipping us swiftly through two starkly contrasting arrangements of water, land, and air. This CGI sweep through the digital enclosure of the dam’s reservoir skims the surface of its stored water, before the camera descends into its placid depths, and color is squeezed to the margins of the frame, as this submarine space of mapping renders submerged earth in myriad points of white light blinking against an infinite black ground.
We have spun swiftly through analog, photogrammetric, and digital visions of natural space, the film funneling our onward look into a pointillist array of moving data. Simultaneously, Murderers Bar unspools in a rhythm tethered to the propulsive flow of water carving through space, a movement which itself becomes the film’s driving force. If water, lacking will, conforms to gravity and floods forward, the camera’s movement in Murderers Bar is characterized by an overarching descent down, and by a general sweeping out of containment into a long-running scene of deliquescence. The rhythms of cinematic iteration in Murderers Bar approximate the eddying, rhythmic, and at times stochastically violent motions of water, but water always under some conditional state of change.
The score of the film, composed and performed by lacks the regulating structure of percussion in these early unfolding scenes. But as the camera drifts on toward an occluded horizon, the score intones repeated notes with a vibratory urgency that recalls the bass calls of signal horns, as ships, far off a given coast, sound a telemetry of objects moving darkly in space. The score is molded by echo, by repetition, and by sequence, understood here as a figure that traverses the sonic and visual dimensions of the film’s earliest scenes. In a strangely proleptic and symbolic coincidence, the staggered declination of the façade of the Copco Number 1 Dam takes on the aspect of a progressively repetitive dissolution of moderated order into the soluble disintegration of collapse.
In the early phases of the film, movement forward in space is sutured to movement backward in time, as the film pivots on a helicopter’s sweeping turn back toward the dam, away from one imagined and distant horizon, back toward this sheer wall, this rictus of massive repression of and resistance to movement, a gendered figure which we enter through the phallic shape of a long protruding valve. In the innards of the dam, as explosive charges are threaded into bored holes, Raven’s film switches down from the airy expanse of its initially wide views, from the amplitude of its helicopter’s vantage, and to the proximal and continually warping perspective of GoPro cameras mounted to laborer’s helmets. The curved but vertiginous shape of Raven’s projection screen elides the camera’s seeing with an implicitly anthropocentric orientation, so that the successive diminution of visual space across these early, telescoping frames intensifies a general sense of progressive containment. That containment is then, suddenly, catastrophically reversed by the moments following the dam’s detonation, as compacted pressure and air and liquid, and the once vacant spaces between each pebble of sediment and rock, are suddenly invaded by the descending force of a reservoir’s worth of water, by a sheer weight whose expulsion from that phallic tube equates to an ecstasy of expurgation, marking the beginning of a general flood.
The film’s score returns with the scouring intensity of that flood, reminding me of the music’s discrete recusal in the moments preceding the dam’s detonation. Raven’s camera swings back into a receding tracking shot directed at this new onrushing wave, as a cascade of reservoir water breaches the dam and remaps the river’s environment. Her cinematography here inverts the structure of the film’s beginning, so that we move recessively backward toward that distant, imagined horizon, as our foreground is repeatedly engulfed by an undifferentiated wall of frothy brown water. This is an event that merges the grey-brown flanks of the river with its stubbly brush, as color briefly flattens material distinction into an expanse of undifferentiated mass, so that change and indistinction briefly coincide. Since we are seated both opposite and above this general flood, in our elevated aluminum bleachers, the haptics of this vast brown sedimentary spillage are set against the ascetic silvery smoothness of our point of view.
The changeable significance of a term like “perspective”—understood as both a material inheritance, a political practice, and an arbitrary, relational position—threads through the entirety of this set of Raven’s works. We might recall, for instance, in Dam Breach’s elevated vantage, the way in which each frame’s vertiginous interpellation of distanced viewing brings the force of gravity to bear upon the act of looking, invoking the risks of imbrication, marking descent into representational space as a thorough-going collapse of objectivity in which one risks the threat of freefall.23 The spectatorial figure implied by supervening vantage is one who stands above and outside depicted space, one afforded the perspicacity of an extensive view and scopic supremacy over the visual field that is consonant with the exercise of power. In other words, Dam Breach’s vantage is that of the drone pilot, and that of the God’s-eye view. Externality, nonimplication, a refusal of the materiality of contingency are each essential qualities defining the affective shape of this spectatorial position. Since the social and aesthetic history of landscape continually (re)stages the dilemma of the necessary relationship between I and we, I and it, mine and yours, ours and theirs, we might consider the possibility that “the figure of the observing subject, exempt from the objective processes and intervening in them as an external manipulator, is itself an effect of social alienation/reification.”24 Such consideration would stress the connections between perspective and a politics of knowledge premised on distance, as Cosgrove makes clear:
A disinterested and objective, scientific geography is the apotheosis of the outsider’s view of the world. It embodies in formal rules the perspective of one who can consider spatial organisation the objective outcome of objective processes, and who can separate himself literally and theoretically from the object of study. It is the opposite of the insider’s experience.25
However, Murderers Bar does not afford its viewers any durable sense of exteriority from the immense scenes that it exhibits. The sheer vertical height of its projection screen so closely scales to the height of the gallery, and to the depth of the seating, that the propulsive movement of the camera draws both my eye and body into frame. The scale and curvature of the screen stretches the film’s wide vertical frames to the limit of the camera lens’s image circle, warping the edges of the images’ frame, casting depicted space outward into exhibition space. In this sense, the anthropocentric proportions of her screen only intensify the camera’s interpellation of my viewing body, even as that screen’s curvature mirrors the curve of my own eye, intensifying a homology or identity effected between spectating body and spectatorial apparatus.
For every reflexive dimension of the installation that thickens my conscious awareness of the act of seeing, or of the material and semiotic staging of perspective, there is a corollary and countervailing force in the sheer visceral fact of this immense, and historically unprecedented, dam breach. For more than thirty-three minutes of the film’s forty-one-minute run, I am always, when watching this immense cascade, seeing the disarticulation of a vast regional architecture of constraint, and the unleashing of a process of ecological change whose outcome is both uncertain and epochal in its scope.
That straightforward fact is, nevertheless, inflected with a certain scatological twist, since the film’s flow is wholly shaped by the spume-filled sedimentary issue of a massive, phallic explosion, a frothy spillage that courses like a last testament, briefly staining the surface of a river emptying out toward the oblivion and indifference of the sea. Raven’s film takes up an iconographic relation to the dam as its vertiginous figure, but from that moment of implosion, from the point of collapse and release, her camera labors assiduously to track the undulating path of the release of the Klamath River, in a tracery of verticality and effluence, of expurgation and dissolution that describes the ecstasy of the dam break, and the trauma of that breach’s dissolution and decay.
Perhaps it’s both the fact and the uncertain implications of decay that most strongly mark the conclusion of the film, in that Murderers Bar is shaped not merely by the Klamath’s estuarial flow, but by a set of deliberate turns that collapse the separation of beginnings from endings, locating decay and regeneration in absolute proximity. At the film’s beginning, Raven’s camera first turns back against its processional flow toward the horizon to sweep up over the dam, and pivot around to reveal its edifice. Her camera then tracks spillage in a movement back toward the coast. The film then turns a third time against the river’s propulsive forward movement to veer back against its drift, and to sweep up to look back at the Klamath’s estuarial demise, at that murky point where the reservoir’s muddy spillage merges seamlessly with the Pacific. The final thirteen minutes of Murderers Bar turn sequence and seriality against progression and teleology, as the film retraces its initial steps, surrendering a view of horizon for the intensity of a zoom into proliferating detail, descending again and again below the surface of the water, as though figuring the frothy and wearying effort of swimming against the tide, upriver, back to the ruin of the reservoir’s wake. The desiccated bed of the lapsed reservoir sets a postapocalyptic scene for new beginnings, and it is at the headwaters of that spillage that ruination and regeneration converge, where death and the spawning of new life now intersect in cyclical, interdependent repetition.26
If I can suggest that Murderers Bar is marked by the collapse of teleology into a concentric structure of perpetual return, one where death and birth overlay each other in the ruins of a reservoir, then I would argue that recursion and transversality are perhaps the dominant figures that traverse this pair of exhibitions. Recursion is the premise by which each Dam Breach test (re)produces hybridity, just as a trans-ness across category and threshold is the basis of each Deposition. Recursion, and the varying hybridities produced by transversal movement, counter every sense of seriality as an absolute determinism. Recursion names the concentric structure beneath Murderers Bar, it names the transverse interpenetration of Raven’s works—their porosity to, and their enactment of states of variable change.
In fact, in the recurrence of the sound of detonation in Murderers Bar, Raven invokes and echoes both Album 1 and Album 2 of her previous work Demolition of a Wall (2022). Filmed on an explosives range near Socorro, New Mexico, Demolition of a Wall traces the air displacement of explosions set off immediately adjacent to, but outside, Raven’s camera frame. The explosions were staged at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology’s test site, in its Energetic Materials Research and Training Center, a center that provides expertise and laboratory space for the experimental study of explosive materials to a client list that includes Raytheon, Honeywell, and Lockheed Martin, as well as the US Departments of State and Defense (or, latterly, “War”). The Trinity test site—location of the very first detonation of an American nuclear bomb—sits forty-five miles south of the location of Raven’s Demolition of a Wall films. This entanglement surfaces the broad swathe of contemporary and historic practices of US militarism, of Indigenous dispossession, of military assaults on civic infrastructure, of Balkanization and ethnic cleansing—both historic and ongoing—that converge through the geographies and the technologies that afford us these images.
Through the sound of detonation, Raven effectively concatenates the prior shockwaves from Demolition of a Wall with the flow of Murderers Bar’s, linking militaristic technologies of genocidal effect with terraforming settler architectures of repression. This very impetus to concatenate, to weave into recursive and transversal relation disparate elements of historical forces, represents a fundamental embrace of entanglement, of relation, of interconnection as both a material reality, and an interpretive position—one which militates against hermetic enclosure, against an aesthetic of homogeneity, against the illusory certitude of absolute division.
If seriality, in modern American art, is, per Hal Foster a customary figure of “advanced capitalism” and of an “industrial production” redolent of processes of “mechanization, standardization, over-specialization and parcellization of labor,” then such historical and contemporary forces are both engaged and articulated within the material structure and the symbolic forms of Raven’s works.27 However, I would argue that in their expression, such forces are subsumed by the willful indiscipline of change. They are swallowed up by its viscous hybridizing iteration, by composition and dissolution, dehiscence and coagulation, as parallel natural processes whose essential impurity28 overwrites the stricture of category with the combinatory force, the insuperable gravity of flow. Raven’s project synchronizes an expressive material grammar of ascetic distinction and mechanical precision to an aesthetics and an ecology of transversal hybridity, one continuously focused on “the relational work of the inorganic,” figured throughout these works in states of change.29
Lucy Raven, Murderers Bar, was on view in the exhibition “Lucy Raven: Rounds” at the Barbican from October 9, 2025 until January 4, 2026. Lucy Raven, Depositions, was on view at Lisson Gallery, 67 Lisson Street, London, from December 6, 2025 until January 31, 2026.
Édouard Glissant, “Transparency and Opacity,” in Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (University of Michigan Press, 1997).
Mary Kelly, “Concentric Pedagogy: Towards an Ethics of the Observer,” October, no. 68 (Spring 2019): 44–45, emphasis in original.
Jose Esteban Muñoz, “Phenomenological Flights: From Latino Over There, and Cubanias Here and Now,” unpublished manuscript, 5.
Kelly, “Concentric Pedagogy,” 44–45.
Muñoz, “Phenomenological Flights,” 5.
The term “severalty” is emblematic of the insidious and disingenuous practice of settler colonialism, in that it ostensibly names the liberatory event of property ownership—the ownership of land allotted in divisible units of property—as the moment of ascension into civilization for the Native American, but it in fact marks the sweeping and unilateral imposition of the logic of property upon a plethora of sovereign nations and indigenous peoples for whom land could never be an individual possession. The Dawes Act of 1887, issued on February 8 of that year, thus “provides for the allotment of lands in severalty to Indians on the various reservations,” while liquidating the tribal structures of common ownership which bequeathed to those native peoples’ their entangled and interdependent communal relationship to land. Severalty, in this sense, marks the creation of divisible units of property that effectively realize the annihilation of an anti-capitalist relation tying historical and contemporary groups of people to their land, in favor of the economic creation of discrete units of property. The evolution and implementation of this logic did result in some allocations of “common property to members of the Five Civilized Tribes (sic; the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles),” but it did so “in exchange for abolishing their tribal governments and recognizing state and federal laws.” In other words, “common property” was acknowledged on condition of the surrender of Indigenous cosmologies and ontologies to the capitalist logic of the settler-colonial market. This is an act that is aesthetic, conceptual, and material, one that I would argue echoes across the many grids and series that subtend much of Raven’s work on the concept of “landscape.” See “Dawes Act 1887,” US National Archives and Records Administration →.
Slavoj Žižek, “Introduction: Dialectical Materialism at the Gates,” in The Parallax View (MIT Press, 2006), 7.
The stabilizing exteriority (the safe outsideness) of Raven’s camera position in Dam Breach seems theoretically instructive here. Denis Cosgrove writes: “Landscape painting is intended to serve the purpose of reflecting back to the powerful viewer, at ease in his villa, the image of a controlled and well-ordered, productive and relaxed world … Perspective, then, was a device for controlling the world of things, of objects which could be possessed.” Cosgrove, “The Idea of Landscape,” in Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Barnes & Noble Books, 1984), 24–25.
The entangled associations in Raven’s work between science, commerce, and aesthetics, with their varying conceptions of value, can be productively read in relation to the historical evolution of the idea of landscape, as elaborated by Dennis Cosgrove: “In 1533 Jemme de Fries of Leuven published the first thesis to show how the mathematics of triangulation could be used for the survey of topography and the construction of maps. He was part of a tradition of map-making in sixteenth century Flanders stretching from Jacob Van Deventer to Gerardus Mercator and Abraham Ortelius, a tradition which would eventually push the science of cartography beyond the empirical techniques of the bird’s eye view … Among the greatest of the sixteenth-century Flemish map-makers was Ortelius whose world atlas was published in 1570. Among his closest friends he numbered Pieter Bruegel the Elder, a painter whose landscapes unite the traditional motifs and landscapes of Flemish painting with the conceptual perspectives made possibly by the Copernican world view and the new cartography.” Cosgrove, “Seasons and Eclogues: Foundations of English and American Landscape,” in Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, 147.
I am thinking specifically here of this aspect of Leo Steinberg’s definition: “These pictures no longer simulate vertical fields, but opaque flatbed horizontals. They no more depend on a head-to-toe correspondence with human posture … The flatbed picture plane makes its symbolic allusion to hard surfaces such as tabletops, studio floors, charts, bulletin boards—any receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data is entered, on which information may be received, printed, impressed—whether coherently or in confusion.” Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” in Other Criteria (Oxford University Press, 1972), 84.
Fred Moten, “Photopos: Film, Book, Archive, Music, Sculpture,” in Zoe Leonard: Survey, exh. cat. (Prestel, 2017), 145.
Georges-Didi Huberman, “The Index of the Absent Wound (Monograph on a Stain),” October, no. 29 (Summer 1984): 63–66.
Huberman, “Index of the Absent Wound,” 67–68.
Kathryn Yusoff, “Mine as Paradigm,” e-flux Architecture, June 2021 →.
Žižek, “Introduction,” 4.
See →.
Huberman, “Index of the Absent Wound,” 63.
“The thirty mammoth-plate (22 × 18 inches) and 100 stereo views that Watkins took in Yosemite in 1861 were among the first photographs of the valley sent back east. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Ralph Waldo Emerson received copies through Starr King, and in 1862 the photographs excited further interest when they were exhibited at Goupil’s New York gallery. It was partly on their evidence that President Lincoln signed a bill in 1864 declaring the valley inviolate and leading the way to the National Parks system.” Department of Photographs, “Early Photographers of the American West: 1860s–70s,” in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, Metropolitan Museum of Art →.
“In 1858, as a yet little known photographer (Watkins), was commissioned to provide photographic evidence of a particular boundary for a case known as US. v. Fossat, possibly the first use of a landscape photograph as evidence in a United States court. Most accounts of the historic uses of photographic evidence date its first American use to Luco v. U.S., in 1859, but this was a year after the Fossat case began in California. This would be Watkins’s first appearance as an expert photographic witness in a California courtroom but it would not be his last. He would photograph the Enriquita and New Almaden mines in the late 1850s and early 1860s as part of U.S. v. Fossat; the land that would become present-day Berkeley and El Cerrito for U.S. v. D.&V. Peralta in 1861; the New Almaden mines again, this time for U.S. v. Castillero, in 1863 … ; and the Kern County agricultural land holdings in Lux v. Haggin in 1886-1887.” Christine Hult-Lewis, “Contested Images: Mining Images, Landscape Photography and the Courts,” in The Mining Photographs of Carleton E. Watkins, 1858–1891, and the Origins of Corporate Photography (PhD diss., Boston University, 2011) 41–42 →.
Yusoff, “Mine as Paradigm.”
I am reminded here, in thinking the significance of symbolic creation to the matter of political economy, of the significant intersections between this essay and Brenna Bhandar’s 2018 book Colonial Lives of Property, which she opens with the cogent assertion that “the novel, as a cultural form, contributed to the sedimentation of narratives and language as the means through which land, territories, and entire geographical regions were rendered as colonial possessions.” Bhandar, “Introduction: Property, Law, and Race in the Colony,” in Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Duke University Press, 2018), 1.
Denis Cosgrove, “The Landscape Idea and the Modern World,” in Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, 262.
I cannot help but to recall here these lines from Hito Steyerl’s 2011 essay on free fall: “Paradoxically, while you are falling, you will probably feel as if you are floating—or not even moving at all. Falling is relational—if there is nothing to fall toward, you may not even be aware that you’re falling … Whole societies around you may be falling just as you are. And it may actually feel like perfect stasis—as if history and time have ended and you can’t even remember that time ever moved forward.” Hito, “In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective,” e-flux journal, no. 24 (April 2011) →.
Žižek, “Introduction,” 7.
Cosgrove, “The Idea of Landscape,” 33.
The closing frames of the emptied reservoir in Murderers Bar strongly recall to me Arthur Jafa’s immense film installation AGHDRA, which has proven a generative text for the work of Saidiya Hartman, whose writing seems apposite to Raven’s concluding scenes: “Human extinction provides the answer and the corrective to the modern project of whiteness, which Du Bois defines as the ownership of the earth forever and ever, the possessive claim of the universe itself. The stranglehold of white supremacy appears so unconquerable, so eternal that its only certain defeat is the end of the world, the death of Man.” Hartman, “The End of White Supremacy: A Romance,” BOMB, no. 152 (Summer 2020) →.
Hal Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism,” in The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (MIT Press, 1996), 62, 63, 66.
“The element, from which we derive a table of pure form, is singular only through extraction, and that extraction has consequences for the matter that is left behind, whether that be the so-called waste matter or dross, or the acids that remove the rocks from the conglomerate, the burning flares on fracking pads that ‘take-away’ the excess gas or the leaching chemicals that fill the hole to push up the tight oil. Extraction produces arrangements of matter that disfigure other organic and nonorganic arrangements, such as bodies and land. The desire that launches the affective work of purity into the world is the same colonial desire that orders the earth from its perceived dishevelment as undeveloped matter.” Yusoff, “Mine as Paradigm.”
Yusoff, “Mine as Paradigm.”
