Join Lucy Raven at Lisson Gallery during Frieze Week to celebrate the launch of her artist's book Socorro!, a series of delicate shadowgrams made at an explosives range in the New Mexico desert. The artist will be present to sign copies.
Thursday 12 October
18:00–20:00 BST
Lisson Gallery
27 Bell Street
London NW1 5BY
About Socorro!
Between 2021 and 2022, artist Lucy Raven created a series of more than sixty unique silver gelatin shadowgrams at an explosives range in New Mexico, often used as a test site by the US Department of Defense and private munition companies. From within a custom-built room-sized black box purpose-built on the site, Raven recorded the elemental pressures of air and the raw materials that constitute the explosive event by exposing photosensitive paper for micro-seconds. These empirical experiments resulted in the subtly inflected abstractions that are collected in this artist’s book.
The town where the explosives range is located was given its name, Socorro (meaning ‘succour’ or ‘relief’), by ailing Spanish settlers when Piro Native Americans welcomed them with water. Raven became interested in this location, which is also close to the very first sites of nuclear weapon testing, whilst filming for the second of a cinematic trilogy of latter-day Westerns, each of which investigates properties of pressure, force, and material transformation in relation to the Western United States, past and present.
Accompanied by newly commissioned essays by art historian Pamela M. Lee and David Levi Strauss
Find out more and order copies here
