'Measuring Shadows' exhibit at the Niagara Arts & Cultural Center

Niagara Arts & Cultural Center press release & image

The Niagara Arts & Cultural Center presents “Measuring Shadows” by Dana Murray Tyrrell.

On July 31, the Investigative Post reported a Niagara Falls family living near the Love Canal containment site petitioned New York state for relocation after excavation work allegedly uncovered industrial fill, chemical odors, and a black substance leaching into their basement.

Their story is the same “Measuring Shadows” argues: What has been declared resolved since the late-1970s remains unresolved, and that the people living closest to Love Canal continue to discover what the ground beneath them still holds.

About the series

“Measuring Shadows” is a new, 14-painting series addressing sites of post-industrial contamination across the City of Niagara Falls. Working from archives, photographs and firsthand accounts, the series examines how contamination creates persistent, invisible geographies of harm, and what happens when ecological disaster becomes embedded in daily life. The paintings explore the unmeasurable: anxiety, eroded trust, the way toxicity bleeds through attempts at normalization.

Paintings within “Measuring Shadows” use contemporary and archival photographs of Love Canal as their reference point. Drawn directly onto canvas and layered with oil paint and glazes, these works are built for close examination and psychological heft. Preliminary marks are preserved underneath successive layers so that each painting carries visible evidence of its own, making the way a landscape holds evidence of what happened to it.

Smaller works employ domestically coded materials – including roofing tar, marking chalk, beeswax and dryer lint – to address the domestic threshold of disaster: basement walls, soil, the air through which contamination enters a home.

This exhibit is on view at the NACC from Oct. 2 through Nov. 11, with an opening reception from 6-9 p.m. Friday, Oct. 2. The NACC is located at 1201 Pine Ave., Niagara Falls.

About the artist

Dana Murray Tyrrell (born 1990 in Buffalo) is an artist, curator and writer living in Niagara Falls. He is a 2026 Individual Artist Grantee from the New York State Council on the Arts and a 2024 Kinetic Grantee from the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art's Generator Fund.

His work is held in the permanent collections of the Castellani Art Museum, Roger Tory Peterson Institute, University at Buffalo department of Art, and the Pride Center of Western New York, as well as private collections across the Northeastern U.S.

Recent solo exhibitions include “Love Canal” at the Earl W. Brydges Library (2024-25), “Floater” at Kingfish Gallery (2021), and “Blue” at the Castellani Art Museum (2017). He has contributed to group exhibitions across Western New York, including at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (2014), the Burchfield Penney Art Center (2021, 2023) and ECHO Art Fair (2016).

Acknowledgements

“Measuring Shadows” was made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts through a 2026 Support for Artists Grant; Arts Services Inc.; the University at Buffalo Love Canal collection; the Niagara Falls Public Library's local history archive; and the Office of the Town Historian of Wheatfield.