Carolyn Lazard: Long Take @ Cantor Arts Center

Editor’s Pick

“Carolyn Lazard is an artist whose practice I find thrilling, not a term I’d usually associate with art. It’s challenging not because it’s hard to understand, but because it challenges the world of art and the world broadly to think about care, compassion, and communication. The final line in their brief artist’s statement epitomizes this challenge: “Their practice attends to what incapacity makes.” Worth the trip.”

-Aaron Harbour

About the Exhibition

Carolyn Lazard: Long Take is a multimedia exhibition that begins with a score for a performance and unfolds as a series of interventions that engage accessibility as an artistic material.

Made in collaboration with dancer Jerron Herman and poet and artist Joselia Rebekah Hughes, the central work, Leans, Reverses (2022), emerges from the relationship between a dance performance, its recording, and transcription (a choreographic score, captions, and audio description). The installation includes two additional works which are created anew at each showing based on the artist’s instructions. Institutional Seat (2022) modifies a standard bench from the museum’s galleries into a version that is more comfortable for all museum visitors. Surround Sound (2022) attends to the floor of the gallery with dance-floor materials. Over the course of the exhibition, this floor will collect marks made by visitors’ shoes, strollers, and wheelchair treads, like another form of tally or notation.

Carolyn Lazard (b. 1987) is a New York-based artist whose primary medium is iteration. They also work across video, sculpture, installation, and performance. Their practice attends to what incapacity makes.