KIM ANNO

Eve from portfolio 10 x 10: Ten Women/Ten Prints, 1995

Silkscreen on paper

Collection Mills College Art Museum, Museum Purchase, Mrs. John C. Sigourney [Mary Singleton], B.A. 1949, Fund, 1995.12.b

A multi-media artist, Kim Anno uses painting, video, printmaking, and photography to convey nuance through abstraction and symbolism. Anno arrived in the Bay Area in the late seventies from Los Angeles to study at San Francisco State University, where she earned her BFA in 1982. After earning her MFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 1985, she went on to teach at California College of the Arts. Growing up in a liberal household, she was influenced by radical politics at a young age. Her mixed identity and interest in activism inform much of her work.

Eve is a silkscreen from the 10x10 Ten Women/Ten Prints portfolio commissioned in 1996 by the Berkeley Art Center. The print is a dark, asymmetrical descension of distorted spheres on a black foreground, which is atop a brighter halftone foundation that adds depth by intentionally revealing its vibrant contrast. Anno’s abstraction of color and shape creates forms that can be assigned multiple identities: reflections of artificial light in dark bodies of water, a disembodied gaze, layers of an oscillating two-dimensional dream. Anno’s work during this period engages with a difficult ephemeral beauty, which is constructed by using abstraction rather than a recognizable narrative. The print retains a painterly quality in its distinct but continuous shifts of color and nebulous entities, as well as the artist’s use of blurred boundaries which render the image as eternally suspended in space.

Ely Gann