Fall/Winter 2025-2026 Exhibition Program at The Power Plant

Jeneen Frei Njootli, Dreaming of new futures, greater empires have fallen, 2024. Hot rolled steel, epoxy. 36 x 108 in. Courtesy of Macaulay + Co. and the artist. Photo: Byron Dauncey.

Fall/Winter Exhibition Program

The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, 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.

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

November 7, 2025 – March 22, 2026

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, production still from Murderers Bar, 2025. Colour video, quadraphonic sound, aluminum and plywood screen, and aluminum seating structure, 41:47. Co-commissioned and jointly acquired by The Vega Foundation and the Vancouver Art Gallery. Courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery. © Lucy Raven, 2025.

Lucy Raven: Murderers Bar

November 7, 2025 – March 22, 2026

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 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.

Murderers Bar traces the propulsive release of water and sediment through the reservoir drawdown, following the Klamath River’s shifting course and ecological transformation. The river now flows freely for the first time in over a hundred years. The impressive removal project is the result of decades of activism, lawsuits, testimony, and organizing led by the Yurok Tribe, Karuk Tribe, Hoopa Valley Tribe, Klamath Tribes, and the Shasta Indian Nation, undertaken alongside a massive river restoration project dedicated to rehabilitating the habitats of numerous species including the threatened Chinook and Coho salmon.

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

This exhibition is organized and developed by The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery and The Vega Foundation. Curated by Julia Paoli, Director & Curator, The Vega Foundation, with Kate Whiteway, Assistant Curator, The Vega Foundation, in dialogue with the curatorial team at The Power Plant.

Admission to all exhibitions and public programs is free.

Upcoming Public Programs:

Fall/Winter Exhibitions Opening Party
November 6, 7:30pm – 10pm
The Power Plant, 231 Queens Quay West, Toronto
RSVP

Technoself Live Performance by Deantoni Parks
November 6, 8:30pm
The Power Plant, 231 Queens Quay West, Toronto
RSVP

In Conversation: Lucy Raven and Stuart Comer, the Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance at MoMA
November 7, 7pm – 8:30pm
OCAD University, 100 McCaul Street, Toronto
RSVP

Live Performance by Jeneen Frei Njootli
November 8, 2pm
The Power Plant, 231 Queens Quay West, Toronto
RSVP

About The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery

The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery is Canada’s leading public gallery devoted to contemporary art, ideas, and conversations. Located at Harbourfront Centre on Toronto’s waterfront, The Power Plant is a vital forum for the creative culture of our time, sharing inspiring and transformative experiences with audiences through free admission to exhibitions and public programs. The Power Plant is guided by the commitment to provide a platform for artists from diverse backgrounds, drawing attention to pressing issues and connecting communities in Canada and worldwide through contemporary art. For more information, please visit thepowerplant.org.

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