Lucy Raven: Level Distance

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 19^th century. 

IMAGE: Lucy Raven, Deposition, Dam Breach, 19, 2024. Sand, dirt, cement, saltwater, silk, wood and aluminum. Courtesy Lisson Gallery and the artist.

ALSO UPCOMING

Jim Mangan: The Crick

In 2014, photographer Jim Mangan began a project documenting the vernacular architecture of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) community in and around Short Creek, on the Utah-Arizona border. First visiting just a few years after the imprisonment of the Church’s Prophet, Warren Jeffs, Mangan gradually became interested in a different story – that of a group of teenage boys who, unlike many in the community, hadn’t left Short Creek. Over the course of five years, Mangan documented these boys’ lives and the alternate reality they created for themselves, living much as they might have in the 19^th century – breaking wild horses, riding through rugged landscapes of southern Utah and northern Arizona on horseback, and making their own buckskin clothing.

While The Crick depicts a community in the wake of social and religious collapse, it is also a story of the community that the young men who live there have forged for themselves. And in a larger sense, it is an examination of the deep relationship to the landscapes of the American West and the natural world that the boys have cultivated – one that is increasingly rare in the 21^st century.

Mangan writes, “I think of The Crick as a call to unity during this era of polarization, an opportunity to experience the beauty, fallibility, and humanity of this idiosyncratic brotherhood. The subjects of these photographs inhabit a unique place in the desert expanses and open skies of the American West, suspended in a liminal space between hell and paradise. I hope that the images offer a bridge between our world and theirs.”

IMAGE: Jim Mangan. High Tail, 2020. Courtesy the artist.