American contemporary artist Lucy Raven reevaluates the landscape, industry, and mythology of the American West through visual experiments in images, film, and installation. In 2012 and 2022, her work was selected to feature in the Whitney Biennial.
Read MoreBorn in Tucson, Arizona, Raven completed a BA in Art History and a BFA in Studio Art at the University of Arizona in 2000. Prior to graduating, she also studied at Escola Massana, a visual arts school in Barcelona, Spain. The desert region of Raven's upbringing is prevalent in her artistic focus on the narratives and labours of the modern American West.
In 2009, Raven completed an MFA at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson.
Grounded principally in animation and film, Lucy Raven's works incorporate the disciplines of photography, installation, drawing, sculpture, and performance to reveal and explore the hidden labour, processes, and power relationships behind the moving image.
In the 2009 work China Town, Raven explores the global production chain of a common industrial material connected to the modern American West. The film, a fast-moving photographic stop-motion animation accompanied with environmental audio recordings, follows the extraction and production of copper in a Nevada mine to its smelting, refining, and eventual conversion to wire in China.
Raven takes a particular interest in the means of production and the mechanisms that produce the moving image. In some of her works, Raven has taken particular interest in the movement of the unseen systems of projection.
In RP31 (2012), Raven uses a projector to run an animated loop of 31 test patterns and calibration charts, used by film projectionists to calibrate for movie screenings.
In works like Curtains (2014) and The Deccan Trap (2015), Raven also explores the global outsourcing of post-production in the making of Hollywood films. The artist further contextualises her artistic endeavours with illustrated lectures.
Lucy Raven co-founded 13BC (13 Black Cats), a moving-image research and production collective, with Evan Calder Williams and Vic Brooks in 2015. Together, they produced the multi-authored moving image work 56 (2015), based on an experimental Roberto Bolaño novel, and 'Fatal Act' (2016–2019).
A more complex, multi-work film project, 'Fatal Act' takes its leave from letters exchanged between German philosopher Günther Anders and former U.S. Air Force pilot Claude Eatherly, who gave the 'all clear' for the Hiroshima bombings.
Raven's film installation Ready Mix (2021), presented at Dia Chelsea, New York, follows similar themes to China Town in reappraising the American West as a heartland of industry. Framed as a series of visual experiments and accompanied with an entrancing soundtrack, the work follows the process for producing concrete in Idaho, focusing on the rhythmically fluctuating elements of the process.
Raven's Dia Chelsea presentation preceded her selection for the 2022 Whitney Biennial as well as her joining the roster of Lisson Gallery, her first commercial representation.
In 2019, Lucy Raven's work Lichtspielhaus (2019), a series of coloured light cells, was chosen for the permanent public architectural commission for the Bauhaus Museum in Dessau, Germany.
Raven has been the recipient of several awards, including the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin (2018), and the San Francisco Bay Area component of the Artadia Award (2013). She has also been awarded numerous artist residencies, including at the Oakland Museum of California in 2012, the Hammer Museum in 2011, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts in 2008.
Lucy Raven has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions internationally.
Solo exhibitions include Ready Mix, Dia Chelsea, New York (2021); Lucy Raven: Edge of Tomorrow, Serpentine Gallery, London (2016); Hammer Projects: Lucy Raven, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2012); Lucy Raven: China Town, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno (2010).
Group exhibitions include Quite As It's Kept, Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2022); 3D: Double Vision, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) (2018); The Garden of Diversion, Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing (2013); Sound Design For Future Films, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2010).
Lucy Raven's website can be found here.
Michael Irwin | Ocula | 2022
