GIGS
From left to right: Designed For Joy co-founders Kristen Sydow and Cary Heise
NOT ‘NORMAL’ Fashion designer Justin LeBlanc explores his own story through art by SUSANNA KLINGENBERG
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tep into Justin LeBlanc’s new exhibition at CAM Raleigh, Probable Normal Hearing, and you step into a story. It’s likely an unfamiliar story—disorienting, surreal, even haunting—unless you’re part of the five percent of the population that is deaf. But good storytelling can disorient and reorient, create distance from its audience and inspire empathy. 50 | WALTER
photography by GUS SAMARCO
Probable Normal Hearing strikes that balance, telling a story that’s challenging, vulnerable and intensely personal. LeBlanc was born deaf, though it wasn’t discovered for several years. The last note scribbled on his medical chart before his doctor realized the diagnosis was “probable normal hearing.” That prominent and unreachable word so long at the top of his audiology charts—
“normal”—haunted his early years. In retrospect, LeBlanc says, “I tried to be normal for so long that I forgot what it was like to be Deaf.” LeBlanc received a cochlear implant at the age of 18, which provided an artificial semblance of sound. He studied architecture, found his calling in fashion design, met great success on the 2013 season of Project Runway and launched his
