Lucy Raven: Level Distance

Lucy Raven is an artist whose multidisciplinary work explores infrastructural systems and the dynamics of changing material states. Through film, installation, sculpture, drawing, and photography, she reframes the landscapes, labors, and myths of American land, both physical and imagined. Lucy Raven: Level Distance features three bodies of work that emerged from her series The Drumfire (2021-2025), a multimedia body of work that takes the genre Western 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. Each of these works is grounded in physical dynamics that literally, psychologically, and metaphorically have shaped the western landscape: the transformation of solid rock into concrete in Ready Mix; extreme air pressure caused by shock in Demolition of a Wall (Albums 1 and 2); and water pressure, its build up and release in Murderers Bar. The works also investigate the development of photographic and moving image technologies and apparatuses whose resultant images were integral to the surveying, exploitation, development, and advertisement of the “Western Frontier.”

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

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.