Lucy Raven: Pressure & Release | Art21 "Extended Play"

(eerie music)

- Human interaction is integral

to all the kinds of
transformation in the landscape.

The sort of buildup,

but also breakdowns
that happen of material.

And the material is
connected to a geography,

but also to a country.

(eerie music)

Okay, I've got a picture.

(drone whirring)

This is nice.

I had been doing a lot
of different experiments

over the years with water and dirt,

poured concrete and cement,

and also with shockwaves and air.

These all had in common a question

around how extreme pressure

and force can actually
transform a material.

So the idea of the series was
bringing together these ideas

around dynamic change and deformation

that went into building the west

and how this country in many
ways is founded on pressure.

Immediately I saw three
different directions

kind of divide these
investigations materially.

The first was Ready Mix,

followed by Demolition of a Wall

and then Murderers Bar.

(techno music)

With Ready Mix, there's this process

of material being mined.

Millions of years of this
glacial moraine ended up in Idaho

and then this rock being sent

on a two mile long conveyor
belt to a gravel plant

and turned into concrete

and then made into a wall

that defines the private
property boundary.

You see gravel becoming
sludge, becoming solid.

That kind of state change
that creates structural

or in some ways infrastructural
violence upon a landscape.

One of the words that I
was noticing coming up

quite a lot was shock.

Shockwaves were going through
the country for one thing

or the other and people were
using it metaphorically.

So with Demolition of a Wall (Album One),

I really wanted to image just a shockwave

traveling across the landscape

without seeing the explosion itself.

What you're seeing there
is air displacement.

I was working with a
team of people very close

to Los Alamos.

That region has been
atomic testing ground,

the site of so many impositions.

In Demolition of a Wall (Album Two),

the engineer that I was working with

had come up with a system

that essentially registers
movement as light.

We were shooting between 20,000
and 75,000 frames a second,

and you're seeing the pressure

of air creating this shockwave.

You can see how pressure is a form.

The sounds you hear of the
blasts are recorded on site

and then in between, there's
quite a lot of music.

Deantoni Parks, the composer
on the entire series,

he slowed down the sample rate,
so he actually described it

as turning a liquid into a solid.

I knew that this final
installment would have to do

with the role of water in the
shaping of the United States,

and in that research, I came
upon the idea of a dam removal,

which I had never even heard of.

Not very many have happened

because people don't
like to take dams down.

They're such symbols
of industrial progress

and they become monuments
of a kind, really.

The only dam that was set

to be removed in the next
several years was this series

of dams along the Klamath
River in Oregon and California.

That actually would be
the biggest dam removal

in US history.

The activism really stretched back decades

led by the number of tribes
that live along the river.

The dam decimated the salmon population.

Pressure was mounting, trying
to get this dam taken down.

What I really wanted to
capture was the release.

(explosion)

It wasn't just dirt that was released.

It was actually 100 years of
this industrial exploitation

of that region.

Maybe thousands of years of material.

I was trying to make going down
the river feel like a chase,

like the opening scene of The Shining

or like the film Figures in a Landscape,

which is almost entirely
a helicopter chase.

(helicopter whirring)

We'd extensively used a helicopter

using one of the older mounts
that was used on The Shining.

One thing I noticed about these films

is that none of them had a stable horizon.

The kind of turbulence in the air.

(drone whirring)

So like under and now
up and then a big leap,

and now in again.

- [Speaker] See that balance, it ruins--

- It's okay, it doesn't
ruin it, it doesn't ruin it.

There you go.

If you were swimming back
upstream against that,

that's the barrage that you
would be confronted with,

a kind of assault.

I realized that I would
have to shoot it, create it.

I'm using a camera with
an underwater probe lens.

We used all kinds of materials.

Dirt, charcoal, glass beads, mica dust,

representing the residue

that was trapped behind that dam.

I wanted it to feel like you
were traveling through a solid

that was moving like a liquid
coming right at the camera.

And then we see underneath the reservoir

with animation from
data that was collected

by the Yurok Tribe and
the Fisheries Department.

This whole time, you've
been going down the river

like a rush,

movement that couldn't be contained,

going all the way down to the ocean.

And then you really hard turn back.

There's a kind of question
of what was left behind.

On one hand, there is a
restoration of the river,

but you see a changed landscape.

Pressure buildup,

collapse,

release.

That really was how the country

had been transformed and deformed.

(explosion)