In Carolyn Lazard’s video CRIP TIME (2018), a set of hands deposits dozens of pills into a seven-day-a-week organiser. Accompanied by the sound of pills spilling from their child-proof containers, the video is a meditation on the temporality of illness and the work of care. This conceit is one which Lazard, who was trained as a filmmaker, addresses through quiet and conceptually driven videos, sculptures, installations, performances, and autotheoretical texts. Presented in The Milk of Dreams are works from Lazard’s 2020 exhibition SYNC that explore the relationship between time, labour, and debility. Sinks are installed like TVs, reframing our conceptions of domestic space. Workers’ comp (2021) is a power lift recliner chair in active state of adjustment and support. The work Privatization (2020) requires that HEPA air purifiers be allotted to fit the exhibition space’s proportions. In Cinema 1, Cinema 2 (2020) the illusion of fire is produced through a screen of steam and projected light. At the installation’s centre is Half Life (2021): a hourglass that marks the toxic dust from one of an endless number of industrial sites slowly poisoning adjacent Black communities across the globe. Seen with the drawing Carolyn Working (2020), an image of the artist in bed staring at a laptop, viewers are pointed back to some of labour that produced this body of work.
Madeline Weisburg
