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Carolyn Lazard

  • Carolyn Lazard’s practice centers disability and accessibility through sculpture, video, installation, and performance. The invisible nature of Lazard’s disability has led them to create work that engages constructions of legibility and visibility. Chronic illness is often seen as a private misfortune; it is rarely viewed as an experience deeply embedded in structures of power and meaning. Rather than an anomaly, Lazard contends that everyone experiences disability in some form. For the artist, disability is a creative lens through which they can conjure alternative modes of accessibility, labor, and care. Lazard often shoots or performs in doctors’ offices or in their own home because spaces of extreme alienation or extreme domesticity are where they locate their disability. Lazard turns these moments—medical procedures, administering medication, navigating medical bureaucracy, hospitalizations—into publicly consumable images or text. The artist is also interested in how popular forms, such as social media or cinematic genres like horror and science fiction, can be vehicles for experiencing intimacy. Their work takes an experience that is often circumscribed to the realm of the private, and makes it visible and sometimes banal. As such, Lazard’s documentation of chronic illness destabilizes the separation of the public and private spheres.

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Carolyn Lazard

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Carolyn Lazard’s practice centers disability and accessibility through sculpture, video, installation, and performance. The invisible nature of Lazard’s disability has led them to create work that engages constructions of legibility and visibility. Chronic illness is often seen as a private misfortune; it is rarely viewed as an experience deeply embedded in structures of power and meaning. Rather than an anomaly, Lazard contends that everyone experiences disability in some form. For the artist, disability is a creative lens through which they can conjure alternative modes of accessibility, labor, and care. Lazard often shoots or performs in doctors’ offices or in their own home because spaces of extreme alienation or extreme domesticity are where they locate their disability. Lazard turns these moments—medical procedures, administering medication, navigating medical bureaucracy, hospitalizations—into publicly consumable images or text. The artist is also interested in how popular forms, such as social media or cinematic genres like horror and science fiction, can be vehicles for experiencing intimacy. Their work takes an experience that is often circumscribed to the realm of the private, and makes it visible and sometimes banal. As such, Lazard’s documentation of chronic illness destabilizes the separation of the public and private spheres.