Lucy Raven and Deantoni Parks
Murderers Bar

Lucy Raven and Deantoni Parks presented 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 marked 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 a dynamic approach to camerawork, including aerial cinematography and underwater imaging, the film traces a surge of sediment and water down the Klamath River in Northern California following the detonation of a century-old dam. Just as the river is released into the Pacific Ocean, the film returns upstream against its renewed flow, where now salmon are once again free to run. The cinematic presence of the mountainous terrain within the film, carved out over millennia by the river, is amplified by the film-performance’s alpine setting in Aspen, 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 the Aspen Music Festival and School, the event featured an ensemble of strings, percussion, and wind instruments led by Parks that carried Raven’s filmic exploration of the landscape into the space of live encounter. The performance expanded the temporal and sonic dimensions of Parks’s original score, layering the sounds of the surrounding environment, including a nearby stream, with the film’s rhythms of flow, rupture, and release.

Murderers Bar is the final installment in Raven’s The Drumfire (2021–25), a series anchored by four 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 and supported by The Shifting Foundation, Murderers Bar centers on the largest dam removal in US history, which followed decades of sustained advocacy by Tribal Nations, including the Yurok, Karuk, Klamath, and Hoopa Valley Tribes, as well as 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.

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 the American West through a cinematic lens, drawing attention to their sensory and spatial dimensions. Her works China Town (2009), Ready Mix (2020), Demolition of a Wall (Album 1 and Album 2) (both 2022), and Murderers Bar (2025) reappraise industrial landscapes as sites of extraction, transformation, and technological mythmaking. Raven’s films and installations have been presented internationally, including recent solo exhibitions at the ICA Boston (2026); Barbican Art Centre, London (2025); The Power Plant, Toronto (2025); the Vancouver Art Gallery (2025); Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2024); and Wiels, Brussels (2022). With Vic Brooks and Evan Calder Williams, she is a founding member of 13BC, a moving-image research and production collective. Raven teaches at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York.

Deantoni Parks is an experimental percussionist, producer, and composer known for his avant-garde practice, which blends acoustic drumming with electronic and granular sampling. He is the founder of KUDU and a member of Bosnian Rainbows. Throughout his more than twenty-year career as a prolific experimental drummer, record producer, and film composer, Parks has collaborated with artists including André 3000 (New Blue Sun), Flea (Honora), Abbi Jacobson (A League of Their Own, Amazon Prime), Paul Schrader (Dog Eat Dog), T Bone Burnett (True Detective, HBO), and Rockstar Games (Grand Theft Auto V), as well as longtime collaborators John Cale of the Velvet Underground and Omar Rodríguez-López of the Mars Volta. His film scoring work is produced through his company We Are Dark Angels, alongside longtime writing partner Nicci Kasper, who also performed with Parks in KUDU and Bosnian Rainbows. In 2019, Parks founded the tech/arts fair Technoself Immersive, followed by the launch of the Technoself School of Philosophy, an online school and curriculum, in 2020.

Murderers Bar is directed by Lucy Raven and composed by Deantoni Parks. It was performed by musicians from the Aspen Music Festival and School: Yueun Rhee (violin), Minkyung Kang (violin), Shanya Chynwat (viola), Brian Lee (cello), Jasper Chambreau (double bass), coached by Tim Weiss, and joined by Lori Patrick (clarinet), Chance Davis (bass clarinet), and Francesca Lujan (flute).

Murderers Bar was curated by Vic Brooks, Senior Curatorial Advisor, and Mariana Fernández, Project Curator, with Daniel Merritt, Chief Curator, and Stella Bottai, Senior Curator-at-Large.

Murderers Bar was produced by Mariana Fernández, with technical direction by Ryan Jenkins, technical advising by Randy Gibson, and screen design by Carl di Paolo. Screen fabrication and assembly were led by Everardo Ramírez and the Double Star Framing team. Additional support was provided by Fastlane Production of Colorado, Julie Wiig, Isabel Mallet, Christine Egaña Navin, John Zinonos, Kevin Haynie, Alicia Russo, Vince Hart, Alex Fonseca, Renata Bustamante, Mikayla Adeeko, and Maca Carluccio.

Lucy Raven, Murderers Bar, 2025, was co-commissioned by Vancouver Art Gallery and The Vega Foundation and supported by The Shifting Foundation. The film was presented by Aspen Art Museum for AIR 2026 on a custom-built screen and accompanied by a newly commissioned ensemble score by Deantoni Parks, in partnership with Aspen Music Festival and School. Special thanks to Kate Northfield Lanich, Vice President and General Manager, and Patrick Chamberlain, Vice President for Artistic Administration.

The 2026 film-performance of Murderers Bar was made possible by the Tisch Discovery Series. The Tisch Discovery Series—a dynamic selection of commissions, performances, and dialogues presented throughout the week—was made possible through a generous gift from Steve Tisch and Jamie Tisch.

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Photo: Lucy Raven and Deantoni Parks, Murderers Bar, 2026. Performance still from AIR 2026: Figures in a Landscape, Aspen, Colorado. Photo: Maria Baranova. Courtesy the artist and Aspen Art Museum