In YOU THINK, Natalie Kahn opens up her personal journals to the world. Her Fine Arts senior thesis project, included in the Error 404 virtual exhibition, consists of 15 text animations beaming with vivid colors and music. Khan invites the viewer’s curiosity and imagination, as well as self-reflection, to interpret the meanings of what are more than simply animations. As she writes in her artist statement, “I brought phrases from the journals I’ve been keeping for the past four years– since I was 18 and started college– to a new situation: the internet.” Kahn skillfully tells a story that engages viewers to strive to both understand these moments and connect with her work, by projecting their own experiences. In recontextualizing her journals, she creates an abstract, psychological self-portrait that envisions a new way in which we can think about how our experiences, thoughts, feelings, and perspectives represent us, as well as how we can express these through art. A Fine Arts major, Journalistic Writing and French minor while at Penn, Kahn is now working as a graphic designer for an architecture firm in Philadelphia. We spoke with Kahn last week about YOU THINK, from her inspirations to her creative process.
Eleanor Shemtov: How did you start making art and realize you wanted to be an illustrator and graphic designer?
Natalie Kahn: It’s actually a funny story, I thought I wanted to be a journalist. All throughout high school and maybe even from middle school, I was convinced I was going to be a journalist. My mother definitely had a stake in this, and she was really into thinking I should be a journalist. I did this summer program at Northwestern in journalism, and I really thought I was going to be a journalist. I had written this whole elaborate Penn essay about how badly I wanted to study Communications, and minor in Journalism and join the DP [The Daily Pennsylvanian, UPenn’s daily student newspaper]. So I got to Penn, I took Intro to Communication & Behavior, and I did in fact join the DP. I didn’t like Communication Behavior, but I liked the DP, and I decided that maybe I didn’t need to study Communications. Then I thought what if I tried Fine Arts. I was doing infographics and data journalism because I had always done art, but it had always kind of been a hobby; it was never something that I actually could see myself doing in any sort of professional capacity. I took Fine Arts 264 and that was the first time I had ever opened Illustrator or Photoshop, freshman year in January. I thought it was cool and at that time I was also the graduate students alumni beat reporter for the DP, so I was writing 2-3 articles about the graduate students and their labor union efforts… I was still really into it at the time. That summer I was looking into journalism internships, but I was an outgoing freshman and obviously it’s really hard to get a cool internship, but at Penn you think you’re supposed to. If I have one piece of advice to outgoing freshmen, it’s to calm down about your internship search. But anyways, I got this unpaid internship at a content marketing firm in New York, and I thought I was going to be writing the content, but it turned out I was doing leg work and making spreadsheets, which was fine. One day my boss said that they needed something formatted in inDesign, and they had the template but no one knew how to do it. He saw I had taken this class and was wondering if I could help. I told him I had never opened inDesign before but I’d try to help. I did it, he started giving me more design work to do, and I started making infographics for him. And that was the first time I learned that you could make graphics and they didn’t have to be journalistic, they could be useful to people without being based on reported data. When I got back to Penn in the fall, I was looking for ways to do fun graphic design related things outside of class. Honestly there aren’t that many. Freshman fall I was in Quadramics Theatre Co., I acted and I also knew that people made posters for the show, so I was the graphic designer for that and did it for two shows that semester. That went well, you do the poster, the cover photo, the apparel, and sometimes other things come up and you help. I was also a senior reporter for the DP, yes we are still writing for the DP! I wrote over the summer too, in case you were wondering. My responsibilities for the DP were pulling on the ones for theater, there was this whole struggle, and eventually I quit the DP and that’s how I decided I wanted to do graphic design full-time. After that I started doing more posters, getting more involved with theater, and a friend at a consulting group from Mind Bank needed a graphic designer to make them a logo, I worked with them, and just different things that popped up. So that was my little journey.
How did you go about finding an idea for your senior thesis and arrive at the idea for YOU THINK?
My first semester project took definitions from the dictionary and I presented them in a unique way, and in so doing made the meanings very violent. That project got me thinking about what happens when you take pre-existing text and pull it out of its initial context and do something else with it, and what meanings you can add to it or project onto a viewer using text that wasn’t originally intended to do that in the first place. How I got to the journals I don’t really know, it was definitely an idea that was sort of in my head for a little while and one day I brought it up to my roommate and I said what if I took text from my journals and used that as my project. I asked her is that weird, and in response she pulled out her journals, we sat on the floor at midnight in our apartment, and we were talking about our journals and I thought yes I have to do this, journals are so important to people. It was definitely many iterations, originally it was supposed to be a poster installation when it was in the gallery space on campus, and then obviously it couldn’t be that. Then I knew that I had to put it on a website, but I wanted to come up with some interactive things for it to do, because I wanted it to be on a website because the website adds to it, not because of the coronavirus. I do firmly believe that the medium is the message, and so that was something that was important to me.
Are there specific artists you looked at who inspired the project?
Yes, with my first project, have you ever heard of Anthony Bowers? Highly recommend his painting class, it’s a lot of work, but it’s worth it. I asked him if he could come visit my studio before the first art show. And he told me about an artist named Christopher Wool. He does these paintings with very simple phrases but due to the way he presents the words and breaks up the lines, and they way they’re a little vague but not too vague, it really opens itself up to a lot of meanings, and it’s really interesting when they’re all displayed together. I was trying to channel that, the artist has one that says “THE HARDER YOU LOOK THE HARDER YOU LOOK”. That’s one of my favorites. Look them up, they’re really cool and he has a very comprehensive website. He also told me about another artist named David Shrigley. He does these neon signs, kind of like Bruce Nauman but a little different and my favorite one says “MY ARTWORK IS TERRIBLE AND I AM A VERY BAD PERSON.” It’s this blue neon sign with a handwriting-like font.
With the journals I was thinking a lot about the privacy/public contrast that arises when recontextualizing my journals online, and I drew inspiration from Sophie Calle and this quote from a press release of one of her shows at Perrotin: “[she] turns onlookers into accomplices to her privacy and leaves them no way out.” That’s super interesting to me, the idea of overwhelming someone with your private material and making them uncomfortable, but I do sort of hide a little bit and it’s mysterious you don’t really know. Also Jenny Holzer has some cool text work too that I was looking at.
As you write in your artist statement, these are phrases from your journals that you’re sharing in the most public of places, the internet. And you’re also leaving them open for interpretation, which leaves the viewer guessing at the context and wanting to know more about where these thoughts and moments came from. Can you talk a little bit more about the opposition between the public and private in your work?
I kind of have this inability to tell a coherent story generally speaking. My first project was definitely very fragmented and left a lot of space for the viewers, and this project also leaves the viewer a lot of space. I just finished the Journalistic Writing minor and was in a Creative Nonfiction class this semester and I wrote this piece that went back and forth. I don’t know what it is, but I can’t seem to do that… I do kind of like the idea of giving the audience something and seeing what they do with it. I think the private/public thing is interesting because it gives the work another layer of meaning, because first you have the meanings from the entries of me growing up or whatever it is that you deduce. I don’t know, for me they mean really specific things, which is actually one of my favorite things about the project. If I read one entry and hear the song that’s playing, I am transported to one very specific place, but I have to remind myself that the experience for a viewer is going to be different, and they might be transported to a very different place, if any place at all, hopefully it is a place. So physical content of the journals aside, I like the fact that it has that second layer of meaning, where you’re thinking, oh wow I’m reading a journal. I think that’s kind of fun, and that reflection coupled with the information I chose to include on that site is interesting.
I love how the text reflects the music as it changes and how each animation is so unique and different from every other one. From the colors, to the text, movement, and choice of sounds, what was your process in deciding how you wanted each animation to look?
Well, first we can talk about choosing the text, because I think that’s part of it. I read through all my journals. It starts out freshman fall and goes until now, and there are times that I wrote more and times that I wrote less. Freshman year I was so thorough, it’s ridiculous. I read through them and marked different quotes, but I still wasn’t sure where I was going with it. I did different tests and had a lot of studio visits when we were still in the studios. Different people had different reactions. At first I was playing with really mundane quotes and wondering if you saw it in the gallery, how would that make you feel. There was one quote that was like, “I was kind of hungover today, I didn’t do much.” My professor said “Eh, you can do better.” Then he was telling me that I should do something really relevant to the time, and later on Ken Lum gave me a visit and the best feedback I got was him saying, “You’re not trying to be Confucius, you should have a range.” I thought, a range. That’s what I need. So every time I was reading through the journals, I thought do I sound like Confucius, am I trying to preach? I then tried to pull the quotes from different time periods, I separated them out by emotion and tone. I didn’t want them all to sound happy or them all to sound sad; I tried to make it so they completed a sort of portrait because I was also going for a portrait vibe. I also wanted them to be a complete story in the entry, but not so complete that I felt like I told you what happened and you felt isolated because you didn’t understand the context. I wanted something that was open to interpretation without being vague.
Then, we have to start thinking about the animations. Actually, fun fact I did not know how to animate, nor did I know how to code. Those were my two things that I wanted to learn and I did learn. My first issue with the animation was because I didn’t know how to do it, I didn’t even know what was possible. It was difficult at the beginning to come up with ideas, because I didn’t know what I could use the medium to do. I started with Instagram, and searched by hashtags, especially #kinetictype and #typeinmotion. Those are really useful for this, and then I found some cool motion designers, a specific one named Georgie Yana. I saw these are the types of things I can use After Effects to do. Then, once I had that in the back of my mind, I first made the one about the shooting stars. And I animated a shooting star. I showed it to my professors and they were like, this isn’t it. They were right, it looked pretty, but it made it look like it was only about shooting stars and that wasn’t the point. They said you should do something still direct but maybe a little less obvious. I started to think about the sentiment behind what I was trying to say in the entry and then evoke that somehow visually in the animation without being too heavy handed about it.
About the music, it’s actually really interesting. The music was something I added later, it wasn’t my first idea. After watching animations online, I thought about how I could implement the music in the project. I’m someone who has a lot of music on all the time. I have very powerful associations with music and my life. I just looked through the entries, the dates, and I very quickly assigned them to different songs that I associated with those moments. I knew that I couldn’t use songs with words because I didn’t want people to think that I was trying to say something with the music, so I decided just to keep it to the instrumentals. That was the process, and then with the clicking I liked the fact that you could play multiple at the same time and have sort of that chaotic event, where the screens and music are chaotic. If I were imagining the inside of my brain it would be something like that, so that was the reasoning behind the music.
You mentioned something really interesting that you imagine this to be sort of a self-portrait, I guess almost like an abstract or textual one. Is there one animation that’s your favorite and maybe one that you struggled the most with, and why?
I think the one about the words flowing out of my tonsils, that’s my favorite and it’s also the one that took me the longest. The way the letters kind of struggle, that sort of gets at the sentiment and what I was feeling. In that one, the text was originally in different colors, and because I was doing this kind of in the dark, I actually sent an in-process version to someone from the office I worked at last summer, because he’s a great animator, and I really needed help and didn’t know who else to ask. I asked him if you have 10 minutes, can you just tell me if I’m on the right track. Instead he sent me detailed feedback on all the different animations; I’ve never been so grateful to someone in my entire life. He said I really like the movement, but I think you can think more about the colors. I said ok that’s a good point, so I thought about it. The day that I was writing about in that entry, it was really rainy. I chose the color grey like the rainy sky, and the yellow, I was like maybe there was lightning that day so that’s where the colors come from. That’s an example of one where the thought process is maybe a little more articulable and less in my head.
I also like the one that’s written in French, the effects were pretty complicated there. That entry I wrote while I was studying abroad in Paris as an exchange student pretty much, it says “Je suis véritablement une étrangère ici. une distance de 4,000 miles.” Also what it says, if you can’t understand it, actually amplifies what’s being written. If I’ve learned one thing, you just have to ask for help.
Some of my least favorites, are “Turned out I had a lot to say” and “Why am I such a girl over this I don’t like it I can feel myself smiling”. Those are ones I did later on, I don’t think they’re bad, I just think they’re maybe not as nuanced as some of the others because I did them at the end. The one with Edward Sharpe also took forever.
Click here to see the full YOU THINK website
Who or what has been most influential in your life or on your art?
Hm that’s a hard question, I think the best way to answer that is with who has always been my favorite artist, because I feel like my influences change. I think especially this year with the senior seminar, and also a very generative art history class I took that shifted a lot of the way I think. I feel like it’s difficult to say, however, when I was 15 I went to Paris with my family and we went to Pompidou, which is still my favorite art museum. I saw the Otto Dix painting, Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden, and I was just awe-struck. I think it’s just me, but it is the coolest painting I have ever seen. Andrew Bowers last year asked me why do you think it’s so cool, and I didn’t really know. What he brought up and I think he’s right is that everything in it is a little bit off, a little bit weird. Her hand is really big, the thing on her eye is a little weird. It makes it so powerful because you just can’t stop looking at it. The colors and everything. That, De Chirico’s work and Magritte, post-photography painters, who were pushing form and you know who needed to find new ways of painting after the camera was invented. What Otto Dix does is really interesting and especially his war paintings. I’m so glad that you know what I’m talking about because some people ask me what my favorite art movement is and I say New Objectivity and it’s like seriously? Max Beckman and George Grosz… so cool.
I also really like Miró, some of his work specifically Dog Barking at the Moon, I think is great. I also love Kandinsky’s use of color. The work of those types of artists are the types of images that would be on my wall that maybe I’m not actively sourcing from but people I look to. This year I took an art class, on Cold War queer art, basically focused on Jasper Johns and Rauschenberg a lot, and I got really into Johns’ work.
What materials or tools do you like to work with the most? Any you’re looking to experiment with?
I do a lot of illustrating and I used to really like colored pencils and recently rediscovered them and I think they’re kinda fun. But something I’m most excited about is coding. I didn’t know how to code at all before this project. And after this project I learned that one, it’s not that hard, and two, it’s really cool what you can do with it. So I want to do a little more interactive stuff.
See more of Natalie’s work @nat.illustrates natkahn.com youthink.gallery
