But Still—The River
By Kit Xiong | March 31, 2025
The Art Critic Fellowship is an art writing intensive program launched in 2025. Over eight weeks, fellows engaged in four lectures led by award-winning editors and writers to discuss the joys and concerns of writing and editing art criticism today, and met one-on-one with their assigned mentors to develop a piece of criticism for publication on AICA-USA’s Magazine.
Kit Xiong is part of the 2025 cohort and was paired with Claudia La Rocco as their mentor.
Last September, one year out from moving to Western New York, I walked the shining expanse of the Niagara River in an unseasonable heat. This was the honeymoon capital Niagara, placid, perfect blue. This was also the Niagara of smoke-belching factories and permitted discharge points, where industrial wastewater flows into the river before it hooks northward toward Lake Ontario. [1]
I’d noticed these discharge points on a walk earlier that summer and had returned for a closer look. As I traced the flow toward the factories, something akin to rotting fish and burning rubber settled in the air. Rusted emission pipes puffed skittishly to my left. I walked until the smell and the anxiety about what I could be inhaling grew too intense, and then I turned for my car and fled.
***
A similar anxiety animates Niagara Falls artist Dana Murray Tyrrell’s paintings on the Love Canal chemical disaster, placed on the second floor of the Niagara Falls public library. The disaster began with the Hooker Chemical Company’s unregulated burial of over 21,000 tons of chemical byproducts, which eventually forced more than 900 families to evacuate from what would become the LaSalle neighborhood of Niagara Falls, and led to the 1980 Superfund Act. [2] Despite once making national headlines, today it has faded from wider national consciousness and local public discourse, even as the health problems it and other chemical-heavy manufacturers created persist in Niagara Falls.
Tyrrell’s project, drawn partially from photographs he took at Love Canal’s outskirts and from older archival photographs, has a documentarian impulse. My knee-jerk response after first seeing his paintings was that they are documents: attempts to render Love Canal—its chemical viscera and its present-day abandonment—proximate to those of us who might otherwise stand at a safe distance from such images. Viewers can even match some of Tyrrell’s paintings to the six black and white polaroids in a central exhibition case.
Yet Tyrrell’s works are equally animated by everything we cannot know. A focal object covering the majority of the canvas in each of his four larger works —a stack of abandoned tires (102nd St), a chemical drum (Drum), a discarded mattress (Garden), a fence cordoning off Love Canal’s inner ring (Inheritance). But it is the negative space that moves in these works. Variations in 102nd St and Drum’s white backgrounds suggest buried objects frozen over—as innocent as rotting leaves, or as violent as chewed-through casings. The filmy paint around the solidly rendered mattress in Garden and wall in Inheritance similarly suggests some invisible chemical life in action, the abandoned objects its only visible form. The unease I feel standing before these works comes from their stillness, the familiar made unknowable.
Dana Murray Tyrrell, Garden, 2024. Oil on canvas, 60 x 38 inches. Courtesy of Dana Murray Tyrrell.
Another set of paintings focuses on the environmental symptoms of disaster Love Canal’s residents have reported over the decades, pulled out of their settings onto small canvases. Groundwater samples the brown runoff that Love Canal leaks after rainfall and snow melts; Swale uses bright orange streaks to recall the possible pathways contaminated water may travel across the earth; Lethe depicts the black sludge that collected in residents’ basements, with a hint of unmuddied Niagara River blue peeking through. [3] Stripped of context, these could be as opaque as unknown substances in test tubes, and functionally, they are: Their small canvases recall scientific specimens, whatever danger they pose safely contained in their rectangular frames. Even without knowing Love Canal, however, these paintings signal something wrong, their toxic brightness and streaky, gritty textures both natural and unnatural.
Dana Murray Tyrrell, Lethe, 2024. Ash, resin, and oil paint on panel, 14 x 11 inches. Courtesy of Dana Murray Tyrrell.
These works masquerade as transparent documentary images of what was and is even as they refuse full legibility. They raise dead questions around Love Canal—is it safe today, will it ever be safe—not via logical proof but by way of suggestion. As such, Tyrrell’s work also questions what visual evidence itself means in a disaster—whether seeing is sufficient for us to know.
In moving away from the proof paradigm, Tyrrell departs from the two primary modes of understanding Love Canal today. One, the scientific view of Love Canal, treats environmental metrics as proof of whether harm has been done— if symptom, then cause; if A, then B—or, more frequently, whether harm has not been done—if not A, then not B. These are deceptively neutral formulations when what constitutes “proof” has been so politicized. The neighborhood north of Love Canal has been declared safe by the EPA despite the agency having never tested the air and soil after 1999, relying instead on indicative groundwater wells. [4] This declaration comes under prevailing assumptions of pollution science, which only considers chemical exposures dangerous to living beings after exposures to certain amounts, or thresholds, and studies isolated chemicals’ effects on humans rather than considering how a mix of chemicals might interact. [5] Under existing legal precedent, furthermore, the EPA can only declare a chemical dangerous after a full risk assessment determines that chemical poses sufficient danger, a process of study that can take years. [6]
The other, an activist view of Love Canal, plays into the converse of the proof-based logic of science and regulation—if B, then A—by centering symptoms as proof of harm, making B too significant to be ignored such that A must be addressed. In one famous photograph of local activist Lois Gibbs with her young children, Missy and Michael, Missy holds a sign asking, “Will I be able to have a normal baby?” Michael, who experienced developmental delays in kindergarten which his mother believes were linked to exposure to Love Canal chemicals, holds one that reads, “Will I see age 7?” [7]
Echoes of that emphasis on visible, shocking damage continue in contemporary accounts like Keith O’Brien’s Paradise Falls, which opens with anecdotes of rocks bursting into flame, chemical residue eating away at the shoes and clothing of politicians, children suffering sudden bouts of blindness after minutes at a playground. [8] As important as this view can be in drawing necessary attention to Love Canal, neither it nor official pollution statistics has proven sufficient to grasp the unresolvable tails of disaster once the “proof” is less obvious and harm less immediate—the safety threshold met, the symptoms no longer shocking, the families who suffered relegated to history.
As a speculative fiction writer interested in how fiction might lead us to better ecological futures, I want Tyrrell’s work to somehow move people to question how we think about pollution today. Or, at least, I want it to make people care enough that they never forget Love Canal and other industrial, environmental disasters lying in wait throughout Western New York. Selfishly, I even want to tug some guidance on what we could do with this knowledge—what I can do—out of the painted shadows.
It’s hard to coax a future out of a disaster incomprehensible in scope and impossible to fully undo. Harder still to believe in the power of art to change things when Tyrrell recalls that Hooker Chemical barrels still resurface on the river in the spring. And the communities living in areas of LaSalle declared “safe” slog through litigation over adverse health effects they still suffer nearly 50 years after the crisis began. [9] And the Goodyear Tire Factory where Lois Gibbs’s husband worked has failed to curb pollution even after an abnormally high incidence of bladder cancer was found in workers and the surrounding community. [10] And my friends from Niagara Falls still speak of friends and family who died too soon. And and and and and. There is no straight line between artmaking and activism, between what we know or feel and what we can or cannot choose to do.
***
Tyrrell, whose parents grew up in LaSalle, remembers the silent shadow of Love Canal throughout his childhood. He also grew up with the double vision of Niagara Falls: on one side, a postcard-perfect river; on the other, a city mired in post-industrial neglect. I can imagine how hard it must feel to do justice to Niagara Falls—his family, his community—neither reducing his hometown to the harms done to it nor reducing the harms. Walking that line is an ethical commitment—to avoid misery porn, to do due diligence in work that involves people’s suffering. It’s also a personal one, as if getting it right will ward off the hurt that comes when someone cannot see your home the way you do. It’s a feeling I’ve gotten just a taste of, living further down the river in Buffalo.
The first instinct one might have in ‘getting it right’—the first instinct I had, trying to write this piece—is to try to explain everything to every possible audience. To somehow do justice to the unbounded outward spiral of what has happened in Love Canal, Niagara Falls, Western New York, the Rust Belt, the cloud of everything, tied together, that hangs above our heads and shines in the water below. I wanted everyone reading to remember what cannot be bounded by straight lines and linear time, and then, selfishly, I wanted that remembering to lead straight into action on a scale I can’t yet imagine. I wanted, and I knew I couldn’t make it happen, and writing with that knowledge also feels like mourning.
I see this impulse to say everything in the marginalia of Tyrrell’s exhibition, simply titled Love Canal: a glass case full of artifacts, polaroids, archival photos, government reports, and a scrapbook of newspaper clippings from the library, presented like a bibliography, a sign of due diligence done. I see the impulse to reach ‘everyone’—art lovers and community members alike—in Tyrrell’s choice to show these works in a public library and to seek support from the Buffalo Institute of Contemporary Art (BICA), provided for projects with “publicly accessible” components. [11] To me, these gestures signal an implicit hope that by doing art of this type, you can do something for your community. To “catalyze reflection,” as Tyrrell put it.
Dana Murray Tyrrell, 99th Street, 2024. Oil and graphite on canvas, 23.25 x 15 inches. Courtesy of Dana Murray Tyrrell.
The restraint displayed in the paintings themselves, however, reflects a less straightforward relationship with those hopes. Groundbreaking and 99th St, the two remaining works in the exhibit, go so far as to erase human presence from the human structures they depict. Human figures fade into shadows in the former’s landscape, which Tyrrell notes was drawn from a photograph of the original Love Canal project groundbreaking. And while the house in 99th St. is recognizable as a real house in Love Canal’s inner ring, a black rectangle hovers over the canvas’s left edge, reminiscent of a different Love Canal house, boarded up with a protest sign staked into the front lawn. What could be a sign also reads like a redaction, a bold stroke through anything these homeowners might have said. [12]
In moments like these, the chasm between what you are allowed to see abandoned in the landscape and what Tyrrell refuses to allow you to know looms large, a refusal to let those who do not already love close enough to see. When viewers—all of whom are nominally part of the community Tyrrell hopes to catalyze—move closer, crowding the fence like tourists at the Falls, the images withhold.
They’re beautiful works regardless. After I first saw them in December, unframed and vulnerable on the library’s concrete walls, I spent an hour on the Niagara River’s edge, shivering with grief. The river was more muted that day, glassy under the slowly setting sun, the light itself colder in winter. Unlike the stillness of September, there was now a little wind.
[1] “State Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (SPDES) Permit Program,” New York State Department of Conservation, accessed February 21, 2025, https://dec.ny.gov/regulatory/permits-licenses/wastewater-stormwater-water-withdrawal/spdes-permit-program.
[2] PBS NewsHour, “Residents Say Love Canal Chemicals Continue to Make Them Sick,” YouTube, August 5, 2018, 1:11-1:17, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64GRkGYaBmM.; “Love Canal Site Profile,” Overviews and Factsheets, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, accessed March 5, 2025, https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/SiteProfiles/index.cfm?fuseaction=second.cleanup&id=0201290.; “What Is Superfund,” U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, accessed March 6, 2025, https://www.epa.gov/superfund/what-superfund.
[3] “The Love Canal Tragedy,” US Environmental Protection Agency Journal, January 1979, https://www.epa.gov/archive/epa/aboutepa/love-canal-tragedy.html.; “Love Canal: A Special Report to the Governor & Legislature” (New York State Department of Health, April 1981), https://web.archive.org/web/20170217143450/https://www.health.ny.gov/environmental/investigations/love_canal/lcreport.htm#toxicological.; Kirstin Butler, “‘It Was Like Watching an Accident in Slow Motion,’” PBS, April 11, 2024, sec. American Experience, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/posioned-ground-accident-slow-motion/.
[4] “Love Canal Site Profile.”; PBS NewsHour, “Residents Say Love Canal Chemicals Continue to Make Them Sick,” (7:05-7:34).
[5] Max Liboiron, “Scale, Harm, Violence, Land,” in Pollution Is Colonialism (Duke UP, 2021), 81–111.
[6] William Boyd, “How Environmental Law Created a World Awash in Toxic Chemicals,” The Law and Political Economy Project, May 28, 2024, https://lpeproject.org/blog/how-environmental-law-created-a-world-awash-in-toxins/.
[7] Lois Gibbs and her children, Missy and Michael, carrying signs at Love Canal protest at Niagara Falls, N.Y. City Hall, Oct. 16, 1978, Penelope Ploughman Love Canal Collection, 1978-1994, University Archives, State University of New York at Buffalo.; O’Brien, Paradise Falls, 44-46.
[8] Keith O’Brien, Paradise Falls: The True Story of An Environmental Catastrophe (Pantheon, 2022), 6; 42; 3-4.
[9] PBS NewsHour, “Residents Say Love Canal Chemicals Continue to Make Them Sick,” (Black Creek Village: 6:28-6:55; Wheatfield: 10:52-11:42).
[10] Ed Drantch, “‘Getting Poisoned’: Niagara Falls Neighborhood under Plume of Cancer-Causing Chemical from Goodyear Tire Plant,” WKBW 7 News Buffalo, January 15, 2025, https://www.wkbw.com/news/i-team/getting-poisoned-niagara-falls-neighborhood-under-plume-of-cancer-causing-chemical-from-goodyear-tire-plant.
[11] The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, “Generator Fund,” accessed March 5, 2025, https://www.generatorfund.org.
[12] Abandoned Love Canal 99th St., Ring 1 homes, Penelope Ploughman Love Canal Collection, 1978-1994, University Archives, State University of New York at Buffalo.; Boarded up Love Canal House, Niagara Falls, N.Y., June 30, 1981. University Archives, State University of New York at Buffalo.
Kit Xiong is a speculative fiction writer and critic interested in the intersections of science, technology, art, and literature. They review fiction for the Buffalo Hive, a local nonprofit arts publication in Western New York. Their other works have appeared in Cornelia, Sine Theta Magazine, and One Teen Story.