The biggest undamming in North American history is captured in this electric new exhibit

With the water coursing below us, we glide through the air like a bird, ears attuned to the gentle rustling of the trees on the riverbanks. It’s a picture that’s at once serene, calming, comforting. 

But just as we grow accustomed to this image, we fall out of the air and plunge into the abyss below. The light from the midday sun gives way to the cold darkness of the river, water hissing harshly as it rushes past, kicking up sediment that clouds our vision and tossing us like a rag doll in a laundry machine. 

Then we emerge above the water, before we’re dunked back down once more, in a vertigo-inducing cycle that continues — up, down, up, down — over and over again. 

This relentless repetition sets up a captivating juxtaposition: between the tranquil, docile appearance of nature and its inherent hidden power. 

Through this, Raven suggests that the natural world is far stronger than we, as humans, can ever comprehend. Tamper with it — or try to tame it for our advantage — and we are destined to fail. Because nature always wins. 

Raven’s 41-minute video exhibition is, at its heart, a sly and thought-provoking study of Icarian folly, capturing the dam removal project along the Klamath River, the largest “undamming” of its kind in North American history. 

The work’s title refers to the name of a particular spot along the Klamath where settler violence occurred, and which was later renamed, rather ironically, “Happy Camp.”

The removal of the four hydroelectric dams, which concluded in 2024, was the result of a decades-long campaign by local Native American tribes and environmentalists, who argued the century-old structures had decimated local fish populations and also upended the surrounding ecosystems. 

In “Murderers Bar,” Raven traces the Klamath’s winding route. Upstream, we observe the reservoir plugged by the dams and bulging at the seams. Then downstream, we see the manufactured landscape created by those same power plants — an eerie, Martian-like wasteland, with the bare riverbed languishing in the open sun. 

Raven lets her audience sit in this uncomfortable tension, pulled apart by these two extremes. But “Murderers Bar” eventually concludes with a scene of catharsis: from above, we watch as one of the Klamath’s dams bursts asunder, reflooding the downstream waterway for the first time in more than a century. 

There’s much hope in this moment, and it’s at this point that Raven’s piece transforms into a work about reclamation. And it arrives in many forms. In the physical sense, there’s how the empty riverbed reclaims the water that once flowed through it. And culturally, there’s how the Native American tribes that live along the Klamath are re-engaging with cultural practices that were lost when the dams were built.

Raven, too, reclaims the tools that enabled the construction of the Klamath dams, making use of digital mapping and precision surveying technology. Paired with a disquieting score by composer Deantoni Parks, “Murderers Bar” is presented on a large curved vertical screen, buttressed with metal supports that recall, somewhat, a section of a hydroelectric dam. 

It also shouldn’t be lost on us the special significance, and resonance, of Raven’s exhibit being presented at the Power Plant gallery, housed in what was formally a coal-burning power station. 

In the end, nature — and art — always heals.