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NKU Gallery celebrates 40 years with alumni show
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Benjamin Rogers' "Irrational Purification"
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I strolled through the Northern Kentucky University (NKU) Art Gallery on a quiet Sunday afternoon as David Knight, gallery director, finished installing the school's 40th anniversary alumni show. Knight was alternately cutting glass, framing and painting pedestals when he told me his main task: to hang a 200-piece wall installation by 1998 graduate Dan Dezarn.
"I have to install all those tiles in a grid pattern before the end of the day," Knight said.
I looked at the creamy ceramic tiles stacked on the floor and tried to imagine the effect that repetition would create. Dezarn's piece is ambitious, but no less than others that were already installed around the gallery.
Paintings by Benjamin Rogers, one of the most recent (2007) graduates in the show, depict bathroom scenes from fascinating vantage points. One reveals a man from directly above lying agonizingly naked on the floor between toilet and tub. In both Rogers' works, the figures appear vulnerable -- after all, isn't the bathroom where we are most exposed, the room in which we "get clean"?
Three hand-painted photographs by 1975 graduate Diane Kruer are less disconcerting. Her small, square depictions of Chinese architecture, framed in rusted metal and mounted on stone, are among the most beautiful objects in the show. Their installation along with two assemblages of rusted pipes and old wood by 2005 grad Benjamin Mattingly seems to evoke China's rural past and its urban, industrial present.
This is the first installment in the two-part Forty Years of Alumni Artists, which will feature a total of 54 artists who graduated from NKU since 1968. Like most shows in its vein, it's a mixed bag featuring photography, painting, sculpture, graphic design and mixed media. But it achieves what it sets out to do, and that is to showcase one of the most rapidly growing art programs in the region.
FORTY YEARS OF ALUMNI ARTISTS is on view at NKU Gallery through Sept. 19. The second installment runs Sept. 25-Oct. 24.
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