Janhavi Khemka Interview - Magazine TM
Full interview transcript below
Photograph by Sara Rose
The Feeling of Sound
Magazine TM Interview with Janhavi Khemka
(Full edited transcript, ASL interpreted by Gabby Aquino)
My name is Janhavi Khemka. This is my name sign. I'm from India and I moved to Chicago for my Master’s. I went to the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and I graduated in 2023. Now I work at Mana Contemporary. I work with printmaking, installation art, sound vibrations, performances, and also animation.
The first time I started printmaking I was really inspired by the artist Vincent Van Gogh. I copied his coloring and I learned how to carve wood in that style. I really noticed the silence within the art and I thought that maybe I could animate it but it wasn't possible for me at the time.
When I moved to Chicago, to my school, my teacher Christopher Sullivan and Joel Benjamin taught me how to make animation with printmaking. But I later faced a challenge, which had to do with sound. How do I add sound to my animation? Because I can't hear it. Deaf artist Joseph Grigley told me about an artist, Adi Hollander, who taught me about vibrations. With vibrations I’m able to kind of go towards performance art, such as in the artwork that was called Your Name, Please? So as I learned about vibrations, I realized “Oh why don’t I make animations with vibrations?”. So I put them both together. So I used drums to create the sound of clouds with thunder because it's the same sound for me vibration wise. So I put drums into the animations of clouds so that the vibrations would turn out the same. I realized this was really fun and interesting to see how they kind of came together! Kind of like when you're outside with the vibrations of trains and buses, trying to find a way to show that. So I put all of these different vibrations I was experiencing in the real world and I put it into animation.
When I was in India, I studied a lot of colors while I was doing woodblock printmaking. I learned a lot about it from YouTube. My teacher only provided the color black but I wanted more. So I watched YouTube and I learned how to use those colors to make a large print. In India, people communicate with me through lip reading. I got used to lip reading in India so it is a lot easier for me compared to here in America. When I moved to America, covid happened and everyone had to start wearing masks so communication became even worse and really hard. That's why I wanted to go to Chicago - to learn more about accessibility and meet more deaf people and deaf artists specifically. It made me feel really good. In India, I had never met another deaf person in my life and now there's so many more so I can understand how to combine my two worlds, the hearing and the deaf world, together.
I applied for that show and they accepted me. About a year ago, they asked me what I wanted for the show and I was like “oh my gosh, how do I approach this?” I went to an art residency at Mass MOCA in Massachusetts. I saw a lot of animation artists and I learned from all of them. I taught wood printmaking. I went to many different places before I came home to work at my art studio again. I mainly commute to my studio and everyday that I take the train, I don’t hear anything. You know, back and forth to the train. For the show I made my shelves just like what you're seeing here in the background. I had three main concepts. One was the heart and emotions. The second was related to yoni and India. In India, there was a man who raped a woman. I, you know, after learning about it, felt awful and unsafe about it while living there. I was really scared to go outside and that was another element I put into my art. The third is shells, and that was really about my grandfather. He would blow into the shell and put it by my ear because he thought that would fix my hearing. But, of course that didn't work and of course I still miss him now. I know he loved me and I still cherish his memory to this day. Those are the three elements I put into the show.
When I moved to America, I stayed at home. I didn't go outside, unless it was to work. I started making a lot of art in different frames. I took pictures of them and put them onto the laptop, then used Adobe After Effects to make animations. Anytime I would commute, I recorded the sound and then brought it and put it into the animation. Also, I moved to a studio by the lake. I went to the lake and I floated in the water, and there’s a picture in the show that you can see: there's two sides - one that's Chicago and one that's India. Both are my homes and the point is that I don't really know where my home is. I felt stuck in the middle. So I felt like I was floating in between two worlds.
Yeah so I made that animation and you can kind of see the sound waves in the video. It would get really loud then drop. If it was really low, it means the vibrations wouldn't show up. If it was too low, when it would hit a certain point as the sound got louder, I would connect it and the vibration would show up. I talked to the deaf artist Adi and they taught me how to connect sound to a vibration through an amp and I picked it up pretty fast. I would play the sound on my laptop and connect it to the amp to test and see what volumes would start picking up vibrations. I would just play around with it and watch as it went up and down. IOn the platform in the show, I wanted to really emphasize to people to feel the same things that I felt.
We had just talked about Frida and that reminded me when I moved here for school, there was an interpreter who was from Florida. I told them the story about the shell and when they went on a trip back home, they brought a shell back for me. I think at that time, there was awful flooding in Florida and their home was destroyed. I felt really bad so I made something for them. You were talking about symbolism (we were discussing a shell in the wall of the garden at Frida Kahlo’s house in Mexico City) and it was the same thing. The shell. That reminded me of my grandfather. The shell is a very important symbol for me. I'm actually going to Mexico very soon because I want to see more and people have been telling me how much I need to go to Mexico and see the art there. I'm trying to figure out how to make a shell sound or to copy that sound that I heard when he put it to my ear. Because I want to use that shell to make a matching animation very soon.
Water is a very important symbol for me. I would take really cold baths when I was younger and I got sick. I got typhoid fever, and that's how I lost my hearing. Because of water. I had a lot of anxiety about water for a very long time. I worked through the anxiety and overtime, recognized the peace that came from water. I do love it now and because you know, life is now a lot better. So that's where that symbolism comes from.
My favorite artists are William Kentridge and Christine Sun Kim. I saw more and more of his animation and it made me feel very inspired with my own art process. Christine, she's a deaf artist as well and she makes her art easily accessible for people. She signs all the time and I really want to make my signing skills match hers as much as I can. Both really inspired me. He (Kentridge) can make anything! His mind is so open, so creative. I really admire the way he plays with art. He doesn't have one method, he does film and then it becomes animation. I thought maybe I can do the same things as him.
Some galleries don't really have any accessibility. When there's Indian people in the room, I can communicate with them through lip reading because I grew up with it and understand it better. But I struggle understanding other people here in America and it's usually a big crowd of people at galleries so it’s very confusing to navigate. When new people came out to see my studio, they thought I was hearing because they could see that I was, you know, speaking and then lip reading a little bit. It was very confusing until they got close to me and saw I was signing too and they would say “oh it's nice to meet you.” I'd kind of just be taken aback and I would say “I'm deaf and I don’t know what you just said”. It's just a very weird feeling and confusing every time I’m in a gallery since there's not a lot of accessibility in that regard. If I go to visit shows of other artists because I want to learn about their work and I want to understand but they have no accessibility. So I don't really ask questions because they're busy and communication is always just kind of an obstacle in every setting. Then the last thing, so I have a blind friend. They want to hear about my work or they want, you know, tactile signs or braille. Same with friends who are in wheelchairs, and maybe the gallery is not accessible enough for them to move around or doesn’t have a ramp. I want them to feel welcome but they can’t come to my shows because it's not very accessible. I want to learn from other artists' works at galleries and they're always speaking about their work but there's no subtitles or captions ever either. So I kind of just have to give up sometimes. I want more accessibility for my shows or Instagram. Sound for blind people. Accessibility for anyone in wheelchairs. Those are some of the goals that I have. Also one thing about these galleries is that people just see the work and they don't know about the process. They don't know how I make it, like with the sounds and the vibrations - it's very challenging. All the time. It's very important for me. I want people to ask me more about my process at the gallery. Because they don't know my story. You know, sometimes I wish people would ask me a little bit more about it. Thank you!
