Jeffrey E. Gundlach Building  
Floor 1 and Ronnen Glass Box Theater 

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.

As Lazard said in a statement for the 2015 Wynn Newhouse Awards:

"Chronic illness is often seen as a private matter or a hyper-personal misfortune. It is rarely viewed as an experience deeply embedded in structures of power and meaning. As such, documenting chronic illness destabilizes the separation of public and private spheres. . . My work takes an experience that is often circumscribed to the realm of the private and makes it visible and sometimes banal."

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.