Author: Dana Tyrrell

Dana Tyrrell is an artist, curator, and writer currently living and working in Buffalo, NY. He has earned degrees from both the University at Buffalo (2015) and the State University of New York at Fredonia (2012).

A decade becomes a digestible increment by which we can measure both the transit of time and the distance between milestones. It is on this occasion, the aluminium anniversary, that Indigo Gallery owner Elisabeth Samuels has mounted the gallery’s current exhibition, X: INDIGO TEN YEARS. It is rare within the reaches of the Western New York arts community to see a more comprehensive snapshot of the art of our time. It becomes a feat both attempted and failed within larger contexts, with a notable exception being the Amid/In WNY exhibition series of 2015/16 by Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center. Indigo’s exhibition…

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Buoys guide us through seas both calm and uneasy, and they play a central function within the exhibit of new sculpture by Shasti O’Leary Soudant, DO NOT MISTAKE OUR SOFTNESS FOR WEAKNESS, on view now at Eleven Twenty Projects. This exhibition of new sculpture by O’Leary Soudant plays off of her past touchstones of successive, iterative forms forged from Rigidized powder-coated stainless steel, operating within the color range of day-glo orange to drag queen chartreuse. Past works have been performative and seductive, but all have focused upon multiplicity of natural forms. O’Leary Soudant’s buoys – each part of a wooden…

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At the latest outing of Anna Kaplan Contemporary it became evident quite quickly that Reed Anderson’s work is the opposite of sublime; art historically the sublime has been defined as a quality of work which inspires awe. Thinking of Hudson Valley painter’s hazy landscapes of winding rivers and overwrought forests, Anderson’s mixed media practice holds the visual space of the anti-sublime. The anti-sublime becomes an explosion of pictorial space and a different sense of awe, with each carefully crafted trompe l’oleil trope turned inside out; stones become cut spaces hovering above a black ground, trees become razor thin lines arcing…

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Recently, Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center’s Executive Director Maiko Tanaka began thinking about the institution’s present mission and what Squeaky’s mission could look like 300 years from now. This thought experiment took the form of a series of questions: What do you fear about technology today? What do you desire from technology today? What do you need from technology today from both an individual perspective and a collective perspective? These questions of the future begin to inform the frame within which Yvette Granata’s first solo exhibition – #d8e0ea: post-cyberfeminist datum – could be understood. What can we do…

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The mystery of death speaks to us in myriad ways. It can be horrific – bloody viscera at our fingertips; it can be remote – removed to touchscreens and newspaper clippings; and it can be an affect of memory – the cold glance of someone else’s death – a corporeal loss close enough to graze your psyche. This last way – the psychological death, the psychic death – is plumbed within the exhibit on view now at the University at Buffalo’s Anderson Gallery in BRACHA : Pietà – Eurydice – Medusa; the first comprehensive, solo museum exhibit of the artwork…

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Death is inevitable. It becomes the destination on each of our journeys, and calls for the illustrious and infamous alike. When death calls for human lives we have mourning; pageantry and ritual allow us to grapple with loss and grief. What happens, however, when death calls for the lives of animals? Who mourns their loss – either by the hands of mankind, or through natural causes – what becomes of their stories, and moreover what happens to the narrative of an entire species once it has been erased from creation. Adele Henderson’s exhibit, Red List, on view now at Indigo…

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Rebecca Wing’s sculptural oddities are an intimate experience. Their handcrafted nature and diverse scale inherently lend themselves to investigation, an investigation that is best undertaken as a solo expedition into uncharted territory; Wing’s work is at once both intimately familiar upon their investigation and upendingly abstracted. This pull between the familiar and the abstract opens up a space in which the viewer is asked to classify what is at times spread across the gallery floor, leaning up against walls, perched atop the thinnest of shelves and basking in BOX Gallery’s Main Street-facing windows. The other aspect, which lends itself so…

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Within portraiture, historic representations of people of color have been assigned to stultifying presences within the frame; at the edge and never the center. Be it as the servant, the slave, or the slain, representations of black bodies, specifically, have been in roles of subjugation. It becomes vital to see, then, how artists such as George Afedzi Hughes work to both confront this malignant history within their own art practice, as well as attempt to move beyond it. A survey of Hughes’ paintings spanning the length of the twenty-first century (up to this point) is on view now at Buffalo…

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As the Spring semester begins in earnest, the hope and promise for tomorrow ushers forth. Academic seniors invariably begin thinking about the future, what they will do once they step beyond academia’s halls, how they will shape their community, and how they will impact the world. For the newest exhibit at the Czurles-Nelson Gallery, however, the impetus becomes the glance backward rather than the slog ahead. “Buffalo State Alumni Artists: Works from the Gerald Mead Collection” brings a moment’s pause to the gallery; showcasing those who have studied at Buffalo State, and have gone on to not only reshape Buffalo,…

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Since the Renaissance the art of the portrait has meant to capture the visage of those who sit before the artist’s easel. These portraits were commissioned to depict the desired nature of their subject; their anointed, God-given power, their vast wealth, their pious nature, or in the case of La Gioconda, their unwavering beauty and eternal mystery. While Tricia Butski’s work deals principally with portraiture, you wont find her subjects smiling coyly. Her figures gesture forth from undulating waves of distortion which only serve to push them further into the background. Butski’s artwork – grounded in exploring the elasticity of…

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