Carolyn Lazard’s Simulated Reality
Carolyn Lazard: Two-way. Installation view, Artists Space, 2025. Photo: Greg Carideo. Image Courtesy Artists Space, New York.
On the occasion of their 2023 exhibition Long Take at the ICA in Philadelphia, Carolyn Lazard addressed the long and awkward history of video in gallery spaces—how it has often required viewers to stand uncomfortably while engaging with time-based media. In response, Lazard proposed a radical idea to the museum: to allow visitors to sit comfortably and actually enjoy the content.
In Lazard’s current exhibition at Artists Space, this commitment is extended. The SoHo gallery has been transformed into a two-chamber black box cinema, screening both a fictional and a documentary film, each shot at the simulation center of Elmhurst Hospital, a facility of NYC Health + Hospitals. For viewers unfamiliar with such training environments, the films may appear simply informative. Yet their clinical, detached objectivity comes across as almost ironic—at times funny, grotesque, and even a bit morbid.
Carolyn Lazard: Two-way. Installation view (Fiction Contract, 2025; Borne, 2025), Artists Space, 2025. Photo: Greg Carideo. Image Courtesy Artists Space, New York.
Two-way is set up in an inclusive and accessible environment for viewing moving image works. This approach is in line with their broader practice, which—as their bio states—takes iteration as its primary medium. Lazard’s work consistently brings visibility to the experiences of disabled people, which have long been marginalized in public spaces, including art institutions. Having spent significant time in hospitals due to chronic illness, Lazard launched In Sickness and Study in 2015, a project documenting the artist’s hand holding sci-fi novels, feminist theory, and art texts while receiving intravenous infusions. They also authored Accessibility in the Arts: A Promise and a Practice in 2019—a manual aimed at helping cultural institutions implement accessibility. Both of these works create surfaces of visibility and foster debate on ableism both within and outside art.
Carolyn Lazard: Two-way. Installation view (Fiction Contract, 2025), Artists Space, 2025. Photo: Greg Carideo. Image Courtesy Artists Space, New York.
Clinical environments resurface in the gallery space and the two videos. Fiction Contract (2025), shown on the right side of the gallery, documents a childbirth simulation involving an all-Black team of healthcare professionals, alongside a Black birthing mannequin named Jayda. The term “fiction contract” refers to the mutual agreement among simulation participants to engage with the scenario as if it were real, while remaining aware that it is, indeed, not. The film maintains a documentary tone, depicting the situation of Jayda giving birth (narrated by a voice whose source is seated behind a window, separated from the labor room) with an upcoming complication given the baby’s size, as the mother lives with diabetes. Fortunately, the procedure ends successfully and Jayda “delivers” her newborn. The rigid formalism of the scene and the evident fact that both mother and baby are inanimate mannequins strikes a painful emotional dissonance. As the exhibition text notes, the work critically examines the use of simulation in medical training and its implications for addressing racial disparities in maternal healthcare.
Carolyn Lazard: Two-way. Installation view (Fiction Contract, 2025; Borne, 2025), Artists Space, 2025. Photo: Greg Carideo. Image Courtesy Artists Space, New York.
The second video, Vital (2025), screened in the gallery’s left chamber, is a fictional narrative. Set in the same simulation center, the video’s protagonist, played by the visual artist Martine Syms, is a Black birthing person attending their first prenatal visit. What begins as a routine appointment quickly devolves into a sequence of awkward moments and institutional disappointments: their gynecologist cancels at the last minute; the substitute doctor, played by the writer and actor Cyrus Dunham, avoids answering their questions; a nurse at reception informs them their insurance won’t cover the visit. Bureaucratic violence, unpredictability, and vulnerability define the medical experience depicted in both works. In both videos, drawing from Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 philosophical work Simulacra and Simulation, the simulation center becomes a hyperreal space where care is no longer tied to lived experience, but endlessly loops within its own signs and performances. Lazard blurs the line between real and fictional to reveal how institutional care is at once deeply scripted and fundamentally unstable.[1]
As the exhibition is conceptually transparent and formally restrained, it allows the viewer to frame and connect it to a foundational text in the history of medicine: Lazard’s Two-way reflects Michel Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic in exposing how the medical gaze is rehearsed and institutionalized, turning the patient into a subject of knowledge even within simulated care.[2] The training videos stage not just clinical procedures, but also the racial and bureaucratic dynamics embedded in them—most strikingly through the figure of Jayda, the Black birthing mannequin.
Carolyn Lazard: Two-way. Installation view (Vital, 2025; Borne, 2025), Artists Space, 2025. Photo: Greg Carideo. Image Courtesy Artists Space, New York.
Carolyn Lazard: Two-way is on view at Artists Space from February 28 through May 10, 2025.
[1] Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, The Body, in Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism (Ann Arbor: University. of Michigan Press, 1983).
[2] Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (New York: Vintage Books, 1994).
Edited by Jubilee Park
