Book launch for Lucy Raven's 'Socorro!'

12 Oct 2023 6-8pm

Cover of Socorro!, 2023. Credit: © Lucy Raven, courtesy of MACK

Overview

Join Lucy Raven at Lisson Gallery in London for the launch of her new book, Socorro!, published by MACK.

Between 2021 and 2022, 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 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. 

The location of the range 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.

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