Carolyn Lazard: Pain Scale and Red Exhibit

The human body has been represented, reproduced, and thoroughly examined both by artists and in art history. However, artists have rarely focused on how institutions such as hospitals and insurance companies or diagnostic tools such as medical imaging and psychological evaluation have determined the ways our bodies and minds are seen in society. Carolyn Lazard’s work focuses on these subjects, highlighting the way that care and care infrastructure impact daily life for all.

Informed by personal experiences and social connections to disability and dependency, Lazard (French, Haitian, and American, born 1987) engages with what they call the “radical possibilities of in/capacity.” In the artist’s view, disability is a generative experience that can help us reconsider the difference between seeing and understanding, and think through concepts such as agency, productivity, and community. The two recent acquisitions on view in this installation consider how our interior lives are shaped by the social institutions that define privacy, accessibility, and what “health” is seen to be.  

Pain Scale considers the legibility of Black pain and the impact of anti-Blackness in the healthcare system. Red is a video installation with particular relevance to Buffalo, which was once home to the pioneering avant-garde filmmakers Tony Conrad and Paul Sharits who inspired Lazard in making it. In addition to being a tour-de-force “handmade” flicker film which Lazard created by rapidly covering and lifting their finger from an iPhone camera lens Red is a poetically futile effort to see “through” or even inside a body. It prompts us to consider disability and access through the lens of abstraction.

This exhibition is curated by Cathleen Chaffee, Charles Balbach Chief Curator.