Lucy Raven

RP31 is an animation composed from 31 film projection test patterns and calibration charts.

Demolition of a Wall (Album 2) was shot at an explosives range in Socorro, New Mexico. Socorro - meaning 'aid' or 'help' - was given its name in the 16th century by Spanish colonizers as a token of gratitude: as the Spaniards emerged from a very barren stretch of desert, native Piro Indians offered them food and water. More recently, the area has been physically imprinted with the history of atomic bomb testing and hypersonic weapons research.

A portrait of Alexander Calder’s work Chef d’orchestra (1966), which was made in collaboration with New York composer Earle Brown. When it was made in 1964, the work was intended to be both an instrument (“played” at intervals in an open score by four percussionists) and a conductor (after it was hit and spun in motion, the musicians returned to their percussion stands and imagined the petals of the mobile superimposed over their written score, playing only those notes.) For Shape Notes, two performances of Chef d'orchestre were staged and recorded. The audio recordings of those performances were then edited and used as a new score from which the visual rhythm of this work was composed.

The moment in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo when Scottie realizes Judy is Madeline.

Slowly scrolling text about the twilight of public access television and the shift from analog to digital.

Lucy Raven's Demolition of a Wall (Album 1) is the second film in 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 industrialized, militarized, and colonized. 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. [Overview courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art]

The Deccan Trap is a sci-fi fable that goes back in space and time, with one layer at a time revealed from a cut out collage of stacked images. The piece travels from some of the newest 3D images being produced in India—at post-production studios converting outsourced Hollywood films from 2D to 3D—to some of the oldest—bas-relief carvings in Ellora’s rock cut temples in Maharashtra.

The final installment in Lucy Raven's "The Drumfire" series. Focusing on the biggest dam removal and river restoration project in US history, Murderers Bar captures a landscape in flux, as the dam, the immense reservoir behind it, and the river now coursing through both, are transformed through the duration of the work

Ready Mix (2021) is a forty-five-minute film shot over two years at a concrete plant in central Idaho. 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’s extra-wide aspect ratio references the surveying origins of the anamorphic format. Developed during World War I to give military-tank operators more expansive views of the terrain, the format later became a staple of Western genre films. Ready Mix collapses this perspectival depth into visual flatness and material density. In doing so, it counters the ways in which Westerns traditionally frame the landscape to perpetuate the myth of the so-called frontier as receding, empty, and untamed.

Follows copper production from an open pit mine in Ruth, Nevada to a smelter in Tongling, China, where the semi-refined ore is sent to be processed and refined.

3D, loop, 2014