Socorro!

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Between 2021 and 2022, artist Lucy Raven created a series of sixty unique silver gelatine 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 inside a custom-built room- sized black box on the site, Raven exposed photosensitive paper for microseconds to record the elemental pressures of air and raw materials, resulting in the abstract monochrome planes which are collected in this artist’s book. The town where the range is located was given its name, Socorro (meaning ‘succour’ or ‘relief’ in Spanish), by ailing Spanish settlers when Piro Native Americans welcomed them with water. Raven became interested in this area, which is also close to the very first sites of nuclear weapon testing, whilst filming for the second part of a cinematic trilogy of latter-day ‘Westerns’, each of which investigates properties of pressure, force, and material state change in relation to the present and historical Western United States. Accompanied by an extensive essay by art historian Pamela M. Lee