Murderers Bar (2025) centres around the recent removal of a monumental concrete dam along the Klamath River, which stretches from its headwaters in southern Oregon to the Sequoia Redwood Forest of Northern California, where it lets out into the Pacific Ocean. The dam’s removal after more than 100 years, after decades of activism, testimony, and lawsuits by Tribal Nations including the Yurok Tribe, Karuk Tribe, Klamath Tribe, and Shasta Indian Nation, is part of the biggest dam removal project in American history, undertaken alongside a massive river restoration intended to restore the historic habitat of the threatened Chinook and Coho salmon. The dam, the immense reservoir behind it, and the river now coursing through both, are inexorably transformed through the duration of the work. Murderers Bar, in turn, finds its form from the release of water at such a colossal scale, a fluid dynamics that has shaped the physical and the imaged/imagined Western United States.

Murderers Bar is the third installment in a series of works—alongside Ready Mix (2021), Demolition of a Wall (Album 1) (2022), and Demolition of a Wall (Album 2) (2022)—that examine the landscape, transformations, and myths of the Western frontier. The works in The Drumfire series unearth cycles of violence, development, and destruction inherent in the transformation of land into landscape, private property, and sites of global industry and trade.