The Niagara Arts & Cultural Center presents Measuring Shadows by Dana Murray Tyrrell.
ON VIEW OCTOBER 2-NOVEMBER 11, 2026
Tuesdays through Saturdays 10am – 5pm
Townsend Gallery – NACC
Opening reception on Friday, October 2, 2026 6:00–9:00 PM
On July 31, 2026 the Investigative Post reported that a Niagara Falls family living near the Love Canal containment site petitioned New York State for relocation after excavation work 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-1970’s 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 fourteen-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 this disaster: the basement walls, the soil, the air through which contamination entered the home. This exhibit is on view at the Niagara Arts & Cultural Center October 2 – November 11, 2026, with an opening reception on Friday, October 2, 2026 from 6:00–9:00 PM.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Dana Murray Tyrrell (b. 1990, Buffalo, NY) is an artist, curator, and writer living in Niagara Falls, New York. 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 (NYSCA) through a 2026 Support for Artists Grant, Arts Services, Inc. (ASI), 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, New York.