Lucy Raven 'Murderers Bar' Performance at AIR 2026, Aspen Art Museum, 28 July

12 June 2026

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On 28 July, Lucy Raven and Deantoni Parks present a film-performance of Raven’s Murderers Bar (2025), accompanied by a newly commissioned ensemble score composed by Parks for the occasion. Staged in a high alpine meadow at T-Lazy-7 Ranch in the Roaring Fork Valley, the performance marks the first outdoor presentation of the film, projected vertically on a monumental curved screen set among the aspens, framed by the expansive backdrop of Pyramid Peak.

With deployment of aerial cinematography and underwater imaging techniques, the film traces the surge of water downstream to the Pacific following the detonation of a century-old dam along the Klamath River in Northern California, before returning upriver to its renewed flow, where salmon are once again free to run. The cinematic presence of the mountainous terrain, carved out over millennia by the river, is amplified by the film-performance’s alpine setting, producing a landscape within a landscape that stages both the fragility and resilience of river ecosystems and the entanglement of the physical environment with human activity and cultural practices across time.

Produced in collaboration with Aspen Music Festival and School, the event features an ensemble of strings, percussion, and wind instruments led by Parks. The score introduces a temporal and sonic dimension that responds to the film’s rhythms of flow, rupture, and release, carrying Raven’s filmic exploration of the landscape’s transformation into the space of live encounter.

Murderers Bar is the final installment in Raven’s The Drumfire (2021–25), a series of moving-image works that explore infrastructural systems and the dynamics of changing material states as matter warps and transforms under pressure. Originally co-commissioned by the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Vega Foundation, the work centers on the largest dam removal in US history, which followed decades of sustained advocacy by Tribal Nations including the Yurok, Karuk, Klamath, and the Shasta Indian Nation, and is part of a broader river restoration effort to revive threatened Chinook and Coho salmon habitats. The film renders the river as an active agent: a force that resists containment, reshapes its environment, and exceeds the structures imposed upon it.

28 July, 2026, 8:30pm
Maroon Bells, Aspen Art Museum

Find out more via Aspen Art Museum.

Image: Lucy Raven, Murderers Bar, 2025, production stills from moving image installation © Lucy Raven, Courtesy of the Artist and Lisson Gallery. Artwork co-commissioned by Vancouver Art Gallery and The Vega Foundation