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NIAGARA FALLS, NY— 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 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 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.
