
The tally of air purifiers that pocked “SYNC,” Carolyn Lazard’s Essex Street gallery debut in September, corresponded to manufacturers’ recommendations. If shown in the volumes of the kinds of institutional spaces where Lazard’s work often appears (Palais de Tokyo, Walker Art Center and the ICA Philadelphia, to name a few), their numbers would multiply according to square footage because it is, in fact, HEPA filter purified breeze blowing from the choir of haloed machine mouths that constitutes Privatization (2020). A new vision of the mundane, Privatization offers at once a moment of toxin respite and a blistering critique in the form of a premonition of urban miasma—infinitely worsened by climate catastrophe and a police force discharging warfare-grade chemicals against its people—becoming an impossible barrier to life. “The work started out as a gesture of goodwill,” Lazard reassures me.

Installation view of Carolyn Lazard, SYNC, Essex Street/ Maxwell Graham, New York, 2020. [A gallery space with white walls and a cement floor filled with objects. In the center of the space is a greenish-brown La-Z-Boy chair that stands upright and leans forward toward the left wall, revealing the metal armature supporting its uprightness. In the center of the space further back and to the left of the chair is a white ceramic sink that sits upright atop a brown stand with wheels. The sink, with its basin facing forward, approximates the overall shape and form of an old television. To the chair’s right along the wall are two electric fireplaces that side by side on the ground. In the far left corner is a cluster of three standing air purifiers. On the wall on the left is a white ceramic sink hung vertically with its basin facing the gallery, approximating the overall shape and form of an old television. Further along this wall is a brown framed drawing. In the center of the back wall an hourglass is hung. On the wall on the distant right is another white ceramic sink hung vertically with its basin facing the gallery, approximating the overall shape and form of an old television.]