Helen Keller Knows She’s There (1989); 8 minutes

“…The rarely examined emotional relationship between student and teacher informs a recent work by New York video artist Sarah Drury. In the deceptively brief Helen Keller Knows She’s There (1989), Drury reflects on the learning process through a montage of pictorial, written, and spoken elements. The eight-minute work weaves textual fragments into a disjunctive voiceover adapted from Keller’s book The Story of my Life (1954). Although one might expect this to entail a recap of Keller’s struggle with deafness and blindess, Drury opts for a more impressionistic rendering. Rather than acclimating the viewer with the specifics of Keller’s autobiography, Drury focuses on passages dealing with her acquisition of language. As such, the tape addresses the ways that words give form to sensory experience even when the senses themselves are absent. It also provides ample opportunity for textual cross-reading, for at times the tactile qualities of Keller’s Victorian prose become so strong that the work assumes a distinctly erotic character…” —excerpt from a review of Helen Keller Knows She’s There by David Trend in Afterimage, October 1989