Philadelphia-based artist Carolyn Lazard often centers their work around themes of race, social justice, education, disabilities and accessibility. How they create their art is central to the process of how one thinks about the medical experience as an institutional and social concept. 

On Monday, April 14, Lazard explored those subjects in a discussion held at the Humanities Institute. 

Lazard’s work spans multiple mediums, including video, installation, sculpture and performance. They utilize the language of conceptual art and avant-garde cinema to create their stories. Their work has been exhibited at national and international venues like the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and more. They have also authored books about the experiences of people with disabilities. 

Seats filled up quickly in the lecture room, as 30 attendees eagerly waited for Lazard to start.

The first piece shown was entitled “CRIP TIME,” which is a video of Lazard opening pill boxes, placing pills in them and closing them. 

“I started thinking about this work as a performance for the camera, or a documentation of a weekly task that I do. What I was really interested in is muscle memory that one develops from certain kinds of labor that are repetitive,” they said.

“When naming the piece ‘Crip Time,’ I was thinking about disabled perceptions of time or any relationship to time that deviates from what we consider to be the standardized clock which is really analogous from other perceptions of time. For me, ‘Crip Time’ is time shaped by dependency.”

Lazard also mentioned that this piece is oriented more towards social reproduction than production. “The kind of work that we do that is often not understood as work or categorized as work but is really generative of how we produce capital in our society … historically described as female work.”

Lazard also quoted Alison Kafer, a disabilities scholar, and said, “‘Crip Time’ is felt time, not just expanded but exploded … rather than bend disabled minds and bodies to meet the clock, ‘Crip Time’ bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.”

Another work of Lazard’s was titled “A Recipe for Disaster.” 

The piece is based around a 1972 episode of “The French Chef” (1962-2022). This television series was the first to include open captions — text burned on the screen for deaf and hard of hearing people — and showcases the host Julia Child cooking recipes. 

In Lazard’s work, an episode is appropriated and a voiceover was added that narrates the host’s actions, making it accessible for blind and visually impaired people. Lastly, they display the words, “WHAT YOU HEAR, IS WHAT YOU GET,” across the screen in a large yellow font. 

Lazard explained the thought process that created this work. 

“I wanted to make an artwork using the tools of media accessibility as the medium of the work. So, I wanted to use captions and audio description as the material … but those materials are quite contingent, and so that led me on a different path, which was looking into the history of closed captioning,” they said.

“For me, open captioning felt like there was radical potential versus the system we have now [closed captioning] which is quite segregated. If you need it, you get it added on versus it is integral to the thing we are all consuming at the same time. So, because of this, I wrote this manifesto of media accessibility through this TV program … it was this utopian vision of a media culture that is integrated.” 

One of the most poignant and thought-provoking pieces of the night was “Pain Scale.” The piece displayed six smiley face emojis meant to be representative of pain. 

“What I basically did was I took the far end of the spectrum of the Wong-Baker [FACES Pain Rating Scale], the super smiley ones, changed the skin from green to brown and repeated it six times,” Lazard said.

The Wong-Baker FACES Pain Rating Scale is a self-assessment tool that contains six faces that range from happiness to sadness. The spectrum is meant to help people express and communicate the level of pain they are experiencing to medical professionals. 

“What I was really interested in was the representation of pain which is a complex thing and some of the representational challenges of pain have to do with obliterating the senses. Trying to perceive pain in normative ways is quite challenging and it is wild to me that one of the most complex human experiences we can have is reduced to a set of emojis, in the healthcare system, as a way to communicate your experience,” Lazard said.

Race is also a central part of Lazard’s work. They explained how disparities in the healthcare system influenced “Pain Scale.”

“There are many racial disparities in the healthcare system where folks will walk into a hospital seeking care, and they will be refuted because they are considered to be drug-seeking or are considered to be disrupted. Basically, race science and bio-medicine have an intimate relationship with each other. And in terms of the scale, can a Black person walk into a hospital and express pain or desire or need and have you be legible as such.”

Racial disparities in healthcare are deeply rooted in both historical and contemporary systems of inequality. These disparities are not only the result of individual biases, but are systematically embedded into policies, practices and cultural beliefs that shut out minorities. 

Lazard showed over 10 pieces from their catalog, each more intriguing than the next.

When the lecture ended, feverous applause erupted from the audience. 

When Lazard hosted a Q&A session, hands rapidly flew up from audience members. 

During this time, Lazard shared their story of becoming disabled at 22 years old. A recurring theme amongst the audience was art serving as a way to express oneself. 

One of the audience members, Emily Ferrante, a 2023 undergraduate student from Stony Brook University who studied business management and women’s, gender and sexualities studies, said, “I found how they incorporated sickness in their work and how their sickness inspired their work quite interesting.” 

Another student audience member, Maggie Lehmann, a Ph.D. candidate at Stony Brook University, said, “I had no clue who Carolyn Lazard was before, but I came to this event because I was interested in learning about their artwork. This was not the type of art I was expecting. Though I’m not an artist, I found the different mediums they used very creative and eye-opening for me as a viewer. I think their pieces are very provocative and emotional — they tell their story.”