lucy raven
May to june 2017

Born in Tucson in 1977, Lucy Raven received a BFA in studio art and a BA in art history from the University of Arizona, Tucson (2000), and an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2008). Primarily grounded in animation and the moving image, Raven’s multidisciplinary practice also incorporates still photography, installation, sound, and performative lecture. Her work deploys image-making processes used in twenty-first-century filmmaking, which often hide the underlying labor in order to investigate the impact of industrial systems and technology within a global infrastructure. Her works can be found in the permanent collections of Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, and the Guggenheim.

During her three-week residency at Bellas Artes Projects, Raven delved into her interest in bas-relief with the carvers in the wood workshops at Las Casas Filipinas de Acuzar. She collaborated with them to create a new animated film, The Sea (2017) – her artistic response to Chapter 22 of Chilean author Roberto Bolaño's 1980 novella Antwerp (published in 2002). Antwerp is comprised of 56 chapters that loosely follow a detective story with unnamed characters such as “the girl” and “the cop” – and Chapter 22 is “the sea” and contains a diagram (Figure 1). The Sea is part of a larger film project called “56,” by Raven’s production company Thirteen Black Cats, in which artists commission different artists and filmmakers to adapt a chapter of the book. Raven worked with the artisans at Las Casas to create wooden waves that can be manually animated with a wooden crank, with further transformations created by her video animation team in New York.

As part of the public program of the Bellas Artes Outpost in Manila, Raven delivered an illustrated lecture entitled “Low Relief”, which she updated with imagery from her visits in the Philippines. “Low Relief” connected the artist’s research on bas-relief sculpture in both India and the United States to the illusion of depth created in stereoscopic 3D films, as well as the globally connected, labor-intensive processes of post-production involved. For more information on this event, please see: http://cnnphilippines.com/life/culture/arts/2017/06/02/lucy-raven-feature.html

Raven is currently developing a new project with Bellas Artes Projects for a future exhibition in late 2018.