The July 9 Gazette article on the current exhibit at A.P.E. Gallery only tells half the story. The article provides a lovely review of Ariel Kotker’s “His Room As He Left It,” but fails to capture the depth and nuance of Judith Klausner’s “There Goes the Neighborhood.” It is not merely “about lawns.” It is about the violence of prescriptive cultural norms. And the artwork itself is far more than just “squares of artificial turf.” Each piece features meticulously sculpted replicas of living things — crepe paper clovers, clay mushrooms, silken dandelion puffs, a flocked mole, a flapping pigeon — threatened by plastic toy soldiers.
The series is a witty and timely indictment of our society’s attempts to control and attack anything deemed unruly or abnormal. It’s a shame the article left all this out, especially since Klausner’s and Kotker’s installations work so well in tandem with each other. Both artists painstakingly recreate everyday objects from scratch and both explore the pain of exclusion based on perceptions of what’s “normal.” No doubt this is why the gallery curators chose to show these two artists’ work together! I hope your readers will attend the exhibition to see this beautiful pairing for themselves.
Julia Cavallaro
Cambridge