Dana Tyrrell

Niagara Falls, New York

Interdisciplinary artist Dana Tyrrell utilizes repurposed and reclaimed elements in his works on paper, sculpture, installations, and paintings. He does so as an individual gesture toward reducing the excess of commercially available art-making materials, as well as a reaction against the wider commodification of art. For his installation, Erosions, Tyrrell incorporates postcards of Niagara Falls, painted over with white RustOleum. His intent in doing so is to draw attention to the Love Canal toxic waste disaster from the late twentieth-century.

Love Canal–a residential neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York–was originally the site of an abandoned canal that became a dumping ground for chemical waste in the 1940s and ’50s. Tyrrell, a lifelong resident of Niagara Falls, has family who lived in Love Canal until it was deemed too toxic in the 1970s. With Erosions, Tyrrell juxtaposes the environmental tragedy of Love Canal with the nearby tourist destination of Niagara Falls by painting over postcards of the latter. The result is a disruption of the intended viewing of the picturesque postcard, asking us to consider the prioritization of economic growth over environmental and community health.