By the 1990s, mass media and our relationships to it had become completely naturalized as part of everyday life. The prevalence of the televisual led to what WJT Mitchell has termed the pictorial turn, wherein images have an inherent power to possess spectators. While the visual and the readable were historically inseparable in Western culture, Mitchell recognized that new varieties of media, coming of age throughout the 1980s and 1990s, now had shifted the dominant power from word to image. We had reached a point at which cinema, video, and other multimedia had replaced literature and the printed word as the decisive elements of late 20th century culture. Mitchell believed that regimes of vision were increasingly deterministic in both visual and political cultures in which understanding is mediated by watching. 

In her practice, Lucy Raven has established a method of dissecting the many elements of the “moving image” from the forms it takes, to its myriad functions and apparatuses. Murderers Bar (2025), the sole work in her solo exhibition at The Power Plant, is the final installment in The Drumfire (2021-2025) series. The main theme of the series is an investigation of the technologies, namely photography and cinema, that facilitated the multifaceted project of development and exploitation that produced the American frontier, or the “Old West.” Here, the land is part of a story told visually and monumentally, and we as spectators are integral witnesses to a historical

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