Signs of summer

The ICA Watershed—a seasonal space in East Boston dedicated to large-scale artist projects—will reopen for the season with Lucy Raven: Rounds. This is a major new exhibition by Lucy Raven (b. 1977 in Tucson, Arizona) includes the United States premieres of Hardpan, a large-scale kinetic sculpture co-commissioned with Barbican Centre, London, and Murderers Bar (2025) a new moving image installation and the final installment of Raven’s series The Drumfire.

Murderers Bar centers around the recent removal of a monumental, century-old concrete dam along the Klamath River in Northern California, part of the biggest dam removal project in American history. The dam, the immense reservoir behind it, and the river now coursing through both, are inexorably transformed through the duration of the work. Murderers Bar finds its form from the immense release of water. Accompanying the film is a dynamic quadraphonic soundtrack scored by Raven’s frequent musical collaborator, composer and percussionist Deantoni Parks. The moving image installation will be situated alongside the newly commissioned monumental kinetic light sculpture, Hardpan. Together, these works speak to themes of cyclical violence and unrelenting force, the legacies of which continue to shape the physical and imagined landscape of the Western United States today.

Sited at the Watershed, a former copper pipe and sheet metal factory in a working shipyard adjacent to the Boston Harbor, this exhibition provides a compelling introduction to Raven’s longstanding engagement with industrial histories and the aesthetics and politics of water today.

The ICA Watershed will reopen on Thursday, May 21st.

On Memorial Day, admission of the ICA including the Watershed is free!  Get the details here.

Photo by Lauren Miller