Silent Echoes (The Meeting)

Stefani Byrd + Wes Eastin, Two Channel Life Sized Projected Video, 2008

Featured at Le Flash!, October 2008, Atlanta, Georgia

The video depicts a chance meeting between two people, one hearing and one deaf.  They accidentally discover their shared knowledge of American Sign Language, the version of sign used in the United States.  The two subjects are able to make a connection through the language and their shared experiences of being seen as “different”, one because of their deafness and the other because of their multi-racial ethnicity.

The video installation puts the audience on the opposite end of the equation.  The audience becomes the one who must struggle to understand.  The piece is meant to challenge the audience to re-evaluate their assumptions about others and to see the possibilities of other ways of being in the world.

(Cast: Lisa Drummond and Jimmy Smith)