TORONTO.- This fall, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery presents two deeply resonant solo exhibitions by Vuntut Gwitchin artist Jeneen Frei Njootli and American artist Lucy Raven. With distinct yet interconnected perspectives, both artists share an interest in the production of lens-based representations and histories of land relations, past and present. Frei Njootli reclaims Indigenous narratives from the distortions of art history, media, and museological display by using culturally resonant materials to create unique works. Lucy Raven's monumental film installation is a slowed-down epic of the postindustrial frontier, revealing how landscapes are shaped by and resist extractive economies. Admission is free.

Jeneen Frei Njootli: The skies closed themselves when we averted our gaze

Jeneen Frei Njootli lives and works in their Vuntut Gwitchin homelands in Old Crow, Yukon. There is an industrial and photo-adjacent focus in their practice, which incorporates culturally intimate materials that manifest in sculpture, regalia, performance, and sound. The skies closed themselves when we averted our gaze brings together a broad range of Frei Njootli’s materially diverse works—some exhibited here for the first time—to consider how representations of Indigenous life are produced and consumed.

In a number of works, the artist has printed images onto sheets of steel, a material that speaks of land, labour, and industry, as well as the history of contemporary art, from Land art to Minimalism. Steel is a material marked by its durability but also by its live reaction to the environment. Liable to rust, any image it captures—a figure in a landscape or a northern wild rose skillfully rendered in beadwork—will change over time. These are artworks that suggest concealment as a means of safeguarding; erasure registered as loss but also protection. The artist takes the same approach with several textile-based works. Objects evoking life on the land have been wrapped in fabric or cast in resin. In the gallery, they are seen, but only through outlines, residues, and traces.

These works cite a long lineage of artists working intentionally with materials that evoke specific personal and political references, from David Hammons to James Luna. In Frei Njootli’s case, they relate directly to the community they live and work in—the self-governing Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation—speaking of ancestral memory, the transfer of knowledge systems, labour, love, kinship, and land relations.

Lucy Raven: Murderers Bar

The Vega Foundation and The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery have co-organized an exhibition every year since 2022. Through this annual collaboration, both organizations bring their international reach to strengthen the presentation and appreciation of artists’ film and video in Canada. This year we are thrilled to co-present Lucy Raven’s newest work, Murderers Bar, 2025, co-commissioned and jointly acquired by The Vega Foundation and the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Murderers Bar is the final instalment in Raven’s series The Drumfire—alongside Ready Mix, 2021, Demolition of a Wall (Album 1), and Demolition of a Wall (Album 2), both 2022. These works explore themes of material states of change, pressure, force, and cycles of violence. They also investigate the development of photographic and moving image technologies and apparatuses that played an integral part in the surveying, seizure, exploitation, development, and advertisement of the “Western frontier.”

Murderers Bar unfolds against the backdrop of the largest dam removal project in North American history, dismantling a monument to 20th century industrial gigantism along the Klamath River. Using multiple forms of aerial and underwater imaging, Raven’s camera keeps pace with the rush of the river as it gushes from its headwaters in Southern Oregon to the Sequoia and Redwood forests of Northern California, where it lets out into the Pacific Ocean. The river becomes the work's central focus, saturated with newly mobilized sediment following the dam's removal; its movements, diversions, and pressures—once harnessed by hydroelectric infrastructure—now released. Murderers Bar reflects on how natural systems are wielded for power—and how they resist.

Murderers Bar is co-commissioned and jointly acquired by The Vega Foundation and the Vancouver Art Gallery.