How We Tell Stories to Children

2015

Sable Elyse Smith’s work seeks to make visible the interior and often unseen spaces and experiences of mass incarceration in the United States. How We Tell Stories to Children incorporates audio of the artist reading aloud, blurry found footage, and audio and video recordings made by the artist’s father while incarcerated, interweaving a personal, tender narrative of connection despite enforced distance. Its fleeting, fractured approach—where so much seems to happen off-screen—evokes the systematized silencing and erasure of the more than two million individuals incarcerated in the United States.