Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing

Floor 6

Born 1987 in San Bernardino, CA
Lives in New York, NY

Carolyn Lazard’s sculptural installation is composed of medicine cabinets filled with Vaseline, both elements that point to domesticity, practices of care, and the industrialization of medicine. Their mirrored surfaces reflect what would otherwise be the interior space of the bathroom. Over the last century, the medicine cabinet, often gendered into “his and hers” arrangements, transported the hospital and the pharmacy into the private domain of the household. Lazard’s artwork often considers the entanglement between illness and capitalism, as well as collective forms of care. Vaseline, a distilled byproduct of oil and gas production, interests the artist because it is both a lubricant and an occlusive ointment. When applied to machinery or skin, it functions as a protective, impenetrable barrier while also facilitating the touching of two surfaces without friction. Lazard’s artistic practice traces everyday encounters of Blackness, disability, and opacity, focusing on the daily acts of maintenance we hold in common, in and against the privatization of life itself.