News from Kim Anno

New movie: Men/Women in Water Cities

2010-11-21T11:04:00.001-08:00

High Water Mark, Sept. 26 7pm, Ice on the high production

2010-09-06T14:54:00.000-07:00

"Percussion Ball" Terry Berlier 2010

Five Artists come together to make Art and Music Sept. 26th, Sunday 7pm at 1105 Virginia at San Pablo Ave., Pacific Basin Building, an Ice on the High production.
Suggested donation: 8$ no one will be turned away for lack of funds

RSVP: skimi2@Comcast.net

Christophe Fellay is a composer, musician, drummer, sound artist and performer living in Switzerland. He has composed music for orchestras, string ensembles, string quartet, chamber orchestras, jazz ensembles and solo instruments. He made several interdisciplinary works including sound installations and performances. His own artistic research area encompasses acoustics, architecture and the interaction between human and machines.

His work has been performed internationally in Europe (London, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Paris, Zurich, Bern, Geneva, Montreux), North America (Seattle, Atlanta, San Francisco, New York.), South America (Buenos Aires), South Africa (Johannesburg, Pretoria). He has been artist in residence at the Red House of New York (2000), Steim Institute in Amsterdam (2004) and Exploratorium in San Francisco (2005).

Christophe is currently member of the London based orchestra: Notes Inégales and has been asked to replace the world famous drummer: Bill Bruford in the project : Skin and Wire from Piano Circus and Colin Riley in London.

Christophe teaches at the Sound Dpt. at ECAV in Sierre, Switzerland where he is in charge of research.

Ricardo Rivera

Ricardo Rivera makes video, sculpture, performances, and drawings. His most recent work is interactive, and is made in the realm of social sculpture and humor. He will present interactive video with the composers, and musicians. He is an adjunct professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and Stanford University, and San Francisco City College. Rivera is also opening a new collaborative exhibition at the Berkeley Art Center, Oct. 9 for the fall season. Ricardo likes to think of the multiplicities of experiences in his new work.

David Coll

David Coll, a versatile, young San Francisco-based composer, has written music for various disciplines, from concert hall to theatre and dance to interactive installations. He has studied at the University of Illinois and IRCAM in Paris, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California-Berkeley. Through ongoing emphasis in notation, the visual, and technology, his works create situations that investigate the physical presence of performers onstage. Through this investigation, sounds, interaction, motion, all are considered as

material, and the results vary between what might be considered wholly music, theatre, or some mix of the two.

David studies primarily with Edmund Campion and Erk Ulman, and has participated in master classes with composers Chaya Czernowin, Steven Takasugi, Brian Ferneyhough, Alvin Curran, and Philippe Leroux. He is a member of poto (potoweb.org). For more information, visit davidcoll.com

Terry Berlier is an interdisciplinary artist who works primarily with sculpture, installation, and video. Her work is often kinetic, interactive and/or sound based and often focuses around everyday objects, the environment, ideas of nonplace/place and queer practice.

Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows both nationally and internationally (Europe, Australia, Middle East) including Barcelona, Venice, Girona, Meinz, Tel Aviv, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Sacramento. She recently received the Kala Art Institute fellowship and residency for 2009-10 in Berkeley, CA. In 2008-9 she received the Visions from the New California Residency at the Exploratorium: Museum of Science, Art and Human Perception in San Francisco through the Alliance of Artists Communities. She has received grants from California Council for Humanities California Stories Fund, City of Cincinnati Individual Artist Grant, and the City of Davis Art Contract.

She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. Terryberlier.com

Rama Gottfried:

Currently based in Oakland, CA, sound artist and composer Rama Gottfried’s recent work focuses on feedback systems and the disembodiment of compositional structures revealed through physical computation, and/or concealed through the application of physical computation as hidden structure.

Rama is currently a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley in the Music and New Media departments, and is associated with UC Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT). Previously he completed studies at the Universität der Künste Berlin, the Manhattan School of Music, New York University, and the University of Vermont. Since 2002, he has been artistic director of New York based Ensemble Pamplemousse exploring electro-acoustic techniques, conceptual curation, and installation performance.

yosemite shown at site santa fe june 18 2010

2010-06-19T01:06:00.000-07:00

"Everyday Mystics" opens July 9th at Patricia Sweetow Gallery

2010-06-03T22:23:00.000-07:00

Kim Anno curated, "Everyday Mystics" at Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco, which opens July 9th friday 5-7:30pm 77 Geary St.
Artists are:
Rene Gertler
Jeff Gibson
Emily Wilson
Ricardo Rivera
Sune Woods
Ali Naschke-Messing

Site Santa Fe Video Showing on June 18 and Oct 12

2010-06-03T22:19:00.001-07:00

working

2010-05-29T18:54:00.000-07:00

Anno exhibits painting, photography, and video at Marcia Wood Gallery 263 Walker St. SW Atlanta, Georgia

2010-05-06T14:14:00.000-07:00

Kim Anno Exhibition in Atlanta at Marcia Wood Gallery

2010-05-06T14:10:00.000-07:00

Ice on the High in April

2010-03-15T12:37:00.000-07:00

Ice on the High presents a Sunday afternoon West Berkeley concert and reading. And Contemporary Textiles will be on exhibit. April 25 at 3pm 1105 Virginia Berkeley, CA 94702 Pacific Basin Building 10-15$ sliding scale no one turned away for lack of funds further info: skimi2@comcast.net

3pm: Miranda Mellis will read from her latest work.

Miranda Mellis is the author of The Revisionist (Calamari Press), now  out in translation in Italy and Croatia, and Materialisms (Portable  Press at Yo Yo labs). Her various writings have appeared in various  publications including Harper's, McSweeney's, Cabinet, Modern  Painters, The Believer, Tin House and elsewhere. She is an editor at  The Encyclopedia Project (Vol.2 F-K should be out Fall 2010:  encyclopediaproject.org). She teaches at the California College of the  Arts and Mills College.

Intermission: On exhibit is the handstitched work by textiles artists whose work has been made locally and shown nationally, Karen Lusnak, Ruth Tabancay, and Joyce Copenhagen. Ruth Tabancay's computerized Jacquard weavings are based on images she photograhed with the scanning electron microscope.

Karin Lusnak creates art quilts and fiber sculpture. She is one of  ten artists appearing in Charlotte Grossman’s documentary film,  "Woman’s Work: Making Quilts – Creating Art". 
Joyce Copenhagen will display several medium-sized quilts and a large vibrant quilt named Boxed Veggies which is pieced in a Tumbling Blocks design.  

4pm we present the band Euphonia:

Euphonia, an acoustic combo featuring soaring
harmony vocals and sophisticated musicianship. This group brings together the compelling voices, restless minds and nimble fingers of four remarkable Northern California musicians.

* Singer-guitarist Sylvia Herold (Wake the Dead, Cats &
Jammers, Hot Club of San Francisco) delivers assertive
guitar work and shoulders most of the storytelling with
her clear, captivating voice.

* Mandolinist Paul Kotapish (Wake the Dead, Kevin
Burke’s Open House) dispenses rhythmic drive and
weaves tunes like vibrant musical threads through the
songs’ fabric while adding his own rich harmony and
lead vocals.
* Accordionist Charlie Hancock (Swing Farm, Crepes
Musette) draws on his deep reservoir of dance-music
performance to provide bounce and passion.
* Bassist Chuck Ervin (The Dialtones, Crepes Musette)
supplies a jazz-inflected pulse and

In its newest recording, The Old Jawbone, Euphonia
offers American old-time songs amid fresh renditions of
from John Hartford, Gillian Welch and the Sons of the Pioneers.
Fiddle tunes from America and Europe are woven throughout.
Guest percussionist Brian Rice adds jumping beans (in a can) along with ajawbone—of course—and a variety of homemade rhythm
instruments, giving these folk songs an unexpected and
compelling groove.The first album, Lovely Nancy (2005), Euphonia used innovative arrangements to breathe new life into songs
drawn from the Anglo-Celtic tradition.

This concert is the second event of Ice on the High at the Pacific Basin Building that brings together down home music, contemporary visual art, and new American writing. Don’t miss it April 25th. For further information: skimi2@comcast.net Tickets at the door 10-15$ sliding scale, no one turned away for lack of funds.

2009-12-29T17:28:00.000-08:00

2009-11-19T19:37:00.000-08:00

To be Released: Ice on the High

Contact info: Kim Anno, skimi2@comcast.net (510) 847-4745

Maggie Foster: Maggieleefoster@yahoo.com ; Aida Gamez gogogamez@comcast.net (510) 589-5358

December 3-6

Thursday Dec. 3- 7:30pm Staged Reading of Ginsberg’s HOWL

Friday Dec. 4- 11-5 day viewing; Performances and video 6:30-10pm

Saturday Dec. 5- 11-5 day viewing; evening performance 6:30-10pm

1659-1643 San Pablo Ave. at Virginia

West Berkeley’s Pacific Basin Building presents,

“Ice on the High”, a feral art/music event for three nights and two days in the first week of December. Emerging and nationally exhibiting artists and performers will present their work in West Berkeley for three evenings of art performances, projection, installations, music, and a staged reading of Allen Ginsberg’s poem, Howl. This event is open to the public for a donation of their choice.

“Ice on the High” is part of a growing wave of temporal upstart art exhibitions, concerts, and events taking the San Francisco Bay Area by storm. All the artists presented are experimenting with this new context for the first time. The economic downslide has led us to create new spaces for art/music. We consider this an antidote in the face of disaster. Pacific Basin is a mixed-use artists/architects’ building with empty storefronts and this art/music program will fill the space. It is our hope that the arts will bring new possibility to our West Berkeley project.

Thursday Dec. 3 7:30pm

The program will begin Thursday night Dec. 3 with a staged reading of Allen Ginsberg’s poem, HOWL at 7:30pm

Kim Anno Directs Readers(artists, writers, photographers) such as Amy Balkin, Leonie Guyer, Jackie Francis, Stephanie Johnson, Lauren Marsden, Alicia Escott, Katherine Sherwood, and Jill Posener among others will read with projected images behind them.

Also:

Ricardo Rivera (Video/performance installation artist) will present a multi-media large scale projection that reacts to the architecture and a dance performance. This is being presented all three nights. It is located on the corner (1659 San Pablo).

Friday Dec. 4, 7pm

Friday night’s concert will be an experimental contemporary music and video project by Luciano Chessa (recently performed at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts) and artist Terry Berlier (recent Exploratorium artist in residence), Also performing Eric Ullman, (Composer/violinist). This will be followed by Josh Churchill’s live sound performance in a raw construction space.

Also, Maggie Foster’s curated Video Program, “Beneath a Passive Surface”will be screened:

This program explores the diverse realm of video and the various ways artists employ it as a process of communication, point of reflection, backdrop for action, and vehicle of abstraction. In "J.M.E. in MySpace: Tropical Feelings", a Comic video essay about grime music and MySpace, Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn show that "beneath the passive surface of the internet, creative energy flows". David Horvitz and Lukas Geronimas try to extend one of Paul McCarthy's installations to include the outside world. In A.K. Burns "Electric in the Cosmic Age", she wrestles fellow Bay Area ex-pat, K8 Hardy in orange spandex with sound by Matt Volla. "In the absence of daylight, we are haunted by ghosts and moths, which pass through walls and create holes in beloved fabrics." Deville Cohen's "The Wall" "explores the possibilities of Paper as a sculptural material, as well as its function as a carrier of a printed image." Joshua Kit Clayton brings awkwardness and insight together through group exercise. And More!!! Artists in the program include:

A.K. Burns Catherine Czacki Joshua Kit Clayton Deville Cohen Maggie Foster David Horvitz and Lukas Geronimas Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn Kamau Patton Marcia Scott

Saturday night 8pm performance sound works by:

Ashley Bellouin

Ben Bracken

Beulah Baker is Lana Voronina

Danishta Rivero

Darwinsbitch

Seth Horvitz/Chuck Johnson

Joshua Clayton

Tina Takemoto presents a live performance: “Looking for Onuma” based on the life of an interned Japanese gay man.

With video works by:

EG Crichton

Elliot Anderson (ucsc, electronic media and video/sculpture)

Pacific Basin Building is open for viewing ongoing works Friday & Saturday 11-5pm

On going media works by:

Liz Walsh (web, video artist &painter)presents an interactive video projection with visual mixing

Marcia Scott(video/filmmaker) will be showing her new video installation, seeing how three video works—two short, South Fork, Yuba River 1&2 and one long, Song of Eurydice—reflect.

Ricardo Rivera(video installation,sculptor) presents a large scale projection visible from the street corner interacting with the architecture and a dance performance.

Maggie Foster (video, performance, sculptor) will be showing new sculpture and video in Studio F

David Coll (ucb composer) will be presenting interactive installation with resonating metal sheets, light bulbs, industrial fan with Heather Gordon’s (poet/visual artist) and Marcia Scott’s projected images.

For further information and press photos:

Skimi2@comcast.net

Maggieleefoster@yahoo.com

gogogamez@comcast.net

The Sentinel - Cultural Connections

2009-10-02T17:40:00.000-07:00

Kim Anno: Shifting Ground

2009-10-02T17:32:00.000-07:00

by Tirza Latimer

To leave something out, to change the implied gravity of the picture plane, to allow the viewer to complete the experience of the work, to conjure the familiar while foiling narrative expectations, these are the tools of the contemporary abstract painter.
Kim Anno

Kim Anno’s recent paintings renegotiate the givens of contemporary abstraction. Symptomatically, the surface, or support, has come to the fore in Anno’s work over the last decade. First, she abandoned canvas to paint on wood panels prepared with gold or silver leaf. “I wanted to consecrate my paintings in a secular way,” Anno explains. [Figs. 1&2: Gold Stripe, 1999; Ukiyo-e, #7, 2001] For those trained in the history of Western art, the use of precious metal leaf as a background calls to mind the devotional paintings of Italian primitive masters or, perhaps, Byzantine artifacts. Gold-leaf painting, though, has an even longer history (approximately 3000 years) as a traditional handcraft in China, Japan, India, and South Asia. For years Anno has studied “the contribution of Eastern influences in abstract thinking, so under-recognized in the West.” Thus the choice to work on wood panels surfaced with metal foil throws the art of painting into deep historical perspective and, at the same time, evokes a sphere of influence that migrates around the globe. Heterogeneity is a political as well as aesthetic choice for Anno. “Homogeneity,” she observes, “denies the full spectrum of cultural identities and perpetuates cultural hierarchies.”

Anno does not disclaim the influence of path-breaking artists in the field of twentieth-century Western abstraction, yet the celebrated names of the New York School (Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, Franz Kline…) do not make her list. “As a student, I wanted to have these heroes but many fell flat. I wanted this because I knew there was urgency in me to recreate the abstract image, the illusive idea. The slippage between illusion and the non-real seemed so compelling.” When I posed questions about her creative lineage, I was surprised to hear Anno identify more sculptors and performers than painters--Janine Antoni, Rebecca Horn, and Barbara Turner Smith, among them. Practices that transgress the bounds national school as well as traditional genre--such as those of Lucio Fontana (a native Argentine and major contributor to the Italian Arte Povera movement) and Anish Kapoor (a Bombay-born artist who has worked in London since the 1970s)--have also sparked her imagination, she divulges. With this transgressive inclination in mind, I turned again to the panel paintings. I was able to appreciate the cultural mobility of the medium and to perceive how the gilded ground, along with the solidity and asymmetries of the wooden supports, imbues these paintings with sculptural dimensions.

Paradoxically, the application of metal foil also has a flattening effect. The flatness of these picture planes, in conjunction with the panels’ emphatic materiality, relates Anno’s work (albeit critically) to a narrative of art history outlined by Clement Greenberg in his classic 1961 essay about “Modernist Painting.” Moreover, the metal leaf Anno has employed, with its 4” square format, creates a grid-like pattern on the support, evoking the dominant substructure of modern and contemporary Western art. For Anno, the underlying grid also has a personal meaning. “My father was a physicist who worked on grid paper, and my process of working on grid paper, and then scaling the work up, was a way to have a dialogue with him.” The personal dimension of Anno’s practice is significant in that it challenges the assumption of rationality and cool objectivity that the modernist grid typically generates. “I became fascinated with these visual contradictions,” she recalls. The grid’s constitutive gilding carries with it decorative associations that, within the Western art world value system, code Anno’s panel paintings in socially as well as personally meaningful ways. “The decorative,” she asserts, “has female connotations; it is therefore perceived as superficial and, like costume and theatricality, intrinsically false. The real truth must be unadorned, pure, white, and Western.” Anno’s reclamation of decorative and non-Western vernaculars has strategic implications.

The choice affirms the political commitments of a generation of painters emerging in the 1970s, when artists such as Louise Fishman and Harmony Hammond rearticulated the conceits of male modernism in gender-neutralizing ways to arrive at abstract vocabularies of their own. Anno’s brushstrokes flow upon the silver or gold grids of her panel paintings to create a new calligraphic language redolent of her own commitments to both feminism and cultural diversity. Her “pictures of the floating world” deterritorialize abstraction. The lyricism of the brushstrokes evoke Japan’s Ukiyo-e masters of the Edo period, while the rich palette captures the vibrancy of Hildegarde of Bingen's medieval illuminations and the intensity of Tantric art. “The first time I made an abstract painting was a moment of ecstasy,” Anno declares. The remark illuminates her attraction to Tantric modes of expression. The scholar Ajit Mookerjee defines Tantra as “a creative mystery which impels us to transmute our actions more and more into inner awareness, not by ceasing to act but by transforming our acts into creative evolution.” It is the transformative energy of ancient forms of abstraction that Anno aspires to tap.

At the same time (and with defiant incongruity), her work engages with Western gestural abstraction, or “action painting,” to employ the phrase coined by the critic Harold Rosenberg in the 1950s. According to Rosenberg, in his essay “The American Action Painters,” the canvas represents “an arena in which to act.” Rosenberg conceived of the paintings produced by Pollock and his contemporaries as the residue of their creative struggles. Both Rosenberg’s seminal essay and Clement Greenberg’s roughly contemporaneous piece, “American-Type Painting,” effectively establish the U.S., and more specifically New York, as the geographic epicenter of post-World-War-II artistic life, supplanting Paris. Anno, born in Los Angeles to mixed-race parents, assimilates cultural references in her work that pay tribute to California’s eastward orientation on the Pacific Rim, while also evincing conversancy with key European and American trends. In this way, Anno intervenes into the exclusionary narratives proposed by the American critical establishment, re-gendering artistic “action” (thus, artistic agency) while globalizing abstract expressionism.

Her paintings are confident, even grandiose, but do not register as “heroic.” They tend to remain in the range of human reach. Although she sometimes employs improvised tools and prosthetic devices, she uses the extensions not to work on a larger-than-life scale but to vary her spatial relation to the painting during the creative process. Whether traced by a brush, an improvised tool, or a finger, “the line is a mark of the human hand,” she insists. “Line,” she adds, “was first a thread or a stripe that could be found in a garment that a human being might wear….The threads are altered by the weaver as well as the person who wears them.” Line, then, “marks the presence of the figure without picturing the figure.” In this way, Anno’s paintings may be viewed as self-portraits, revealing aspects of both the artist’s person and her personality: her physicality, her sensuality, her multicultural allegiances. “Content is important to me, but I want to leave the viewer free to decide what the content means.” She embraces abstraction because it resists the kind of interpretive closure that figuration might solicit, but, at the same time, she does not disdain narration. “I want to make the last abstract painting I can make before it becomes narrative,” she explains.

Fearing that the grid would eventually “predict a certain way of working” and that this, in turn, would impose habits of viewing, Anno broke her working pattern in 2003 to experiment with the use of aluminum “canvases.” [Fig. 3, Wind, 2006] At the suggestion of Harmony Hammond, she began painting directly on metal. “This was initially to eliminate the omnipresent grid” she confirms, “which had become restrictive. I needed a more neutral ground plane. The metal offered an illusive quality. It’s more ambiguous. Sometimes it looks really deep in space, and other times it looks flat or unusual, distant from everyday life.” Abandoning the irregular wood panels embellished by metal leaf to opt for an industrially produced material, Anno positioned herself to make a significant intervention into to the aesthetics of canonical minimalism. Rather than vaunting the cool anonymity and machine-made perfection of the industrial material (as male minimalists such as Carl André or Donald Judd have done), Anno “messes with” the metallic surface, “roughing it up” for the paint to adhere. “This creates an image gestalt to work with or against,” she claims. Moreover, this preliminary scouring lays down the first layer of marking that transforms the aluminum itself into an expressive medium, troubling the dichotomous distinction between machine-produced and hand-crafted. The abrasions tone down (but do not cancel) the reflective quality of the metal. An underlying glow shows through the water-like patterns left by notched tools that the artist fashions out of vinyl coving. The metal ground gives Anno the flexibility to trace lines or create fields of color by removing as well as applying paint, registering every stage of the creative process.

A similar sense of fluidity characterizes Anno’s recent works on paper. [Fig. 4, Smoke, 2007] In 2007, Anno began an on-going artists' book project, Sleep, with the poet Anne Carson. Here, Carson reflects on Marcel Proust’s À la Recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past). As the title Sleep suggests, both the imagery and the text explore notions of unconsciousness. For this project, Anno produced black and white photographs of pigments and objects floating in water. Page by page, the book appears to submerge. Carson’s text, printed face to face with Anno’s images, dialogs with the visual prompts while responding to Proustian passages where the narrator contemplates the dream life of the protagonist Albertine. Words (“irrefutables, irréparables, innomables, imprévisibles, imperturbables...”) flow like threads of ink slowly dissolving in water.

Lately, Anno’s painting has undergone a sea change that, in retrospect, seems to have been forecast by these works on paper. “I started pouring white grounds that are very fluid onto the metal, and working on top of that. The white paint gives me a different kind of color spectrum than working on bare metal.” These almost accidental looking white spills create “floating islands of ground on the metal” and introduce the new streams of poetic association apparent in the works exposed in Liquescent. We think of white as a “neutral” color, but the neutrality of white has been achieved through a long and culturally invested process of naturalization. Anno’s paintings stage a productive encounter between the white ground conventional in modern Western art and the less historically charged aluminum support. The resulting contrast highlights the artificiality of white’s blankness while permitting Anno to mobilize the connotations white inevitably carries (white is pure, white is sublime). [Fig 5: Rose Snow, 2008] White here functions as trope reflecting the artist’s ecological consciousness: icy landscapes melt into the sea. These are not quiet paintings. They are charged with the strange beauty of unnatural catastrophe and animated by the elemental tensions of a cycle that transforms solid to liquid, liquid to vapor. They are both more theatrical than her earlier paintings (freezing a moment in an unfolding drama) and more detached (the drama is viewed from a distant, disembodied perspective). Yet, as in her earlier wood panel paintings and first experimental works on aluminum, Anno persists in creating zones of contact between elements commonly understood as opposites. The cerebral and the sensual form inseparable bonds. The edges that separate East and West, ancient and modern, figuration and abstraction, words and images, dissolve. Here, Anno fully revels in the unruly processes of visual reorientation to create paintings that provoke passionate aesthetic emotions and, at the same time, stimulate complex thought.

new photographs

2009-09-26T20:06:00.000-07:00

Shifting Ground by Tirza Latimer

2009-09-26T20:01:00.000-07:00

Kim Anno: Shifting Ground

To leave something out, to change the implied gravity of the picture plane, to allow the viewer to complete the experience of the work, to conjure the familiar while foiling narrative expectations, these are the tools of the contemporary abstract painter.

Kim Anno

Kim Anno’s recent paintings renegotiate the givens of contemporary abstraction. Symptomatically, the surface, or support, has come to the fore in Anno’s work over the last decade. First, she abandoned canvas to paint on wood panels prepared with gold or silver leaf. “I wanted to consecrate my paintings in a secular way,” Anno explains. [Figs. 1&2: Gold Stripe, 1999; Ukiyo-e, #7, 2001] For those trained in the history of Western art, the use of precious metal leaf as a background calls to mind the devotional paintings of Italian primitive masters or, perhaps, Byzantine artifacts. Gold-leaf painting, though, has an even longer history (approximately 3000 years) as a traditional handcraft in China, Japan, India, and South Asia. For years Anno has studied “the contribution of Eastern influences in abstract thinking, so under-recognized in the West.” Thus the choice to work on wood panels surfaced with metal foil throws the art of painting into deep historical perspective and, at the same time, evokes a sphere of influence that migrates around the globe. Heterogeneity is a political as well as aesthetic choice for Anno. “Homogeneity,” she observes, “denies the full spectrum of cultural identities and perpetuates cultural hierarchies.”

Anno does not disclaim the influence of path-breaking artists in the field of twentieth-century Western abstraction, yet the celebrated names of the New York School (Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, Franz Kline…) do not make her list. “As a student, I wanted to have these heroes but many fell flat. I wanted this because I knew there was urgency in me to recreate the abstract image, the illusive idea. The slippage between illusion and the non-real seemed so compelling.” When I posed questions about her creative lineage, I was surprised to hear Anno identify more sculptors and performers than painters--Janine Antoni, Rebecca Horn, and Barbara Turner Smith, among them. Practices that transgress the bounds national school as well as traditional genre--such as those of Lucio Fontana (a native Argentine and major contributor to the Italian Arte Povera movement) and Anish Kapoor (a Bombay-born artist who has worked in London since the 1970s)--have also sparked her imagination, she divulges. With this transgressive inclination in mind, I turned again to the panel paintings. I was able to appreciate the cultural mobility of the medium and to perceive how the gilded ground, along with the solidity and asymmetries of the wooden supports, imbues these paintings with sculptural dimensions.

Paradoxically, the application of metal foil also has a flattening effect. The flatness of these picture planes, in conjunction with the panels’ emphatic materiality, relates Anno’s work (albeit critically) to a narrative of art history outlined by Clement Greenberg in his classic 1961 essay about “Modernist Painting.” Moreover, the metal leaf Anno has employed, with its 4” square format, creates a grid-like pattern on the support, evoking the dominant substructure of modern and contemporary Western art. For Anno, the underlying grid also has a personal meaning. “My father was a physicist who worked on grid paper, and my process of working on grid paper, and then scaling the work up, was a way to have a dialogue with him.” The personal dimension of Anno’s practice is significant in that it challenges the assumption of rationality and cool objectivity that the modernist grid typically generates. “I became fascinated with these visual contradictions,” she recalls. The grid’s constitutive gilding carries with it decorative associations that, within the Western art world value system, code Anno’s panel paintings in socially as well as personally meaningful ways. “The decorative,” she asserts, “has female connotations; it is therefore perceived as superficial and, like costume and theatricality, intrinsically false. The real truth must be unadorned, pure, white, and Western.” Anno’s reclamation of decorative and non-Western vernaculars has strategic implications.

The choice affirms the political commitments of a generation of painters emerging in the 1970s, when artists such as Louise Fishman and Harmony Hammond rearticulated the conceits of male modernism in gender-neutralizing ways to arrive at abstract vocabularies of their own. Anno’s brushstrokes flow upon the silver or gold grids of her panel paintings to create a new calligraphic language redolent of her own commitments to both feminism and cultural diversity. Her “pictures of the floating world” deterritorialize abstraction. The lyricism of the brushstrokes evoke Japan’s Ukiyo-e masters of the Edo period, while the rich palette captures the vibrancy of Hildegarde of Bingen's medieval illuminations and the intensity of Tantric art. “The first time I made an abstract painting was a moment of ecstasy,” Anno declares. The remark illuminates her attraction to Tantric modes of expression. The scholar Ajit Mookerjee defines Tantra as “a creative mystery which impels us to transmute our actions more and more into inner awareness, not by ceasing to act but by transforming our acts into creative evolution.” It is the transformative energy of ancient forms of abstraction that Anno aspires to tap.

               At the same time (and with defiant incongruity), her work engages with Western gestural abstraction, or “action painting,” to employ the phrase coined by the critic Harold Rosenberg in the 1950s. According to Rosenberg, in his essay “The American Action Painters,” the canvas represents “an arena in which to act.” Rosenberg conceived of the paintings produced by Pollock and his contemporaries as the residue of their creative struggles. Both Rosenberg’s seminal essay and Clement Greenberg’s roughly contemporaneous piece, “American-Type Painting,” effectively establish the U.S., and more specifically New York, as the geographic epicenter of post-World-War-II artistic life, supplanting Paris. Anno, born in Los Angeles to mixed-race parents, assimilates cultural references in her work that pay tribute to California’s eastward orientation on the Pacific Rim, while also evincing conversancy with key European and American trends. In this way, Anno intervenes into the exclusionary narratives proposed by the American critical establishment, re-gendering artistic “action” (thus, artistic agency) while globalizing abstract expressionism.

Her paintings are confident, even grandiose, but do not register as “heroic.” They tend to remain in the range of human reach. Although she sometimes employs improvised tools and prosthetic devices, she uses the extensions not to work on a larger-than-life scale but to vary her spatial relation to the painting during the creative process. Whether traced by a brush, an improvised tool, or a finger, “the line is a mark of the human hand,” she insists. “Line,” she adds, “was first a thread or a stripe that could be found in a garment that a human being might wear….The threads are altered by the weaver as well as the person who wears them.” Line, then, “marks the presence of the figure without picturing the figure.” In this way, Anno’s paintings may be viewed as self-portraits, revealing aspects of both the artist’s person and her personality: her physicality, her sensuality, her multicultural allegiances. “Content is important to me, but I want to leave the viewer free to decide what the content means.” She embraces abstraction because it resists the kind of interpretive closure that figuration might solicit, but, at the same time, she does not disdain narration. “I want to make the last abstract painting I can make before it becomes narrative,” she explains.

Fearing that the grid would eventually “predict a certain way of working” and that this, in turn, would impose habits of viewing, Anno broke her working pattern in 2003 to experiment with the use of aluminum “canvases.” [Fig. 3, Wind, 2006] At the suggestion of Harmony Hammond, she began painting directly on metal. “This was initially to eliminate the omnipresent grid” she confirms, “which had become restrictive. I needed a more neutral ground plane. The metal offered an illusive quality. It’s more ambiguous. Sometimes it looks really deep in space, and other times it looks flat or unusual, distant from everyday life.” Abandoning the irregular wood panels embellished by metal leaf to opt for an industrially produced material, Anno positioned herself to make a significant intervention into to the aesthetics of canonical minimalism. Rather than vaunting the cool anonymity and machine-made perfection of the industrial material (as male minimalists such as Carl André or Donald Judd have done), Anno “messes with” the metallic surface, “roughing it up” for the paint to adhere. “This creates an image gestalt to work with or against,” she claims. Moreover, this preliminary scouring lays down the first layer of marking that transforms the aluminum itself into an expressive medium, troubling the dichotomous distinction between machine-produced and hand-crafted. The abrasions tone down (but do not cancel) the reflective quality of the metal. An underlying glow shows through the water-like patterns left by notched tools that the artist fashions out of vinyl coving. The metal ground gives Anno the flexibility to trace lines or create fields of color by removing as well as applying paint, registering every stage of the creative process.

               A similar sense of fluidity characterizes Anno’s recent works on paper. [Fig. 4, Smoke, 2007] In 2007, Anno began an on-going artists' book project, Sleep, with the poet Anne Carson. Here, Carson reflects on Marcel Proust’s À la Recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past). As the title Sleep suggests, both the imagery and the text explore notions of unconsciousness. For this project, Anno produced black and white photographs of pigments and objects floating in water. Page by page, the book appears to submerge. Carson’s text, printed face to face with Anno’s images, dialogs with the visual prompts while responding to Proustian passages where the narrator contemplates the dream life of the protagonist Albertine. Words (“irrefutables, irréparables, innomables, imprévisibles, imperturbables...”) flow like threads of ink slowly dissolving in water.

Lately, Anno’s painting has undergone a sea change that, in retrospect, seems to have been forecast by these works on paper. “I started pouring white grounds that are very fluid onto the metal, and working on top of that. The white paint gives me a different kind of color spectrum than working on bare metal.” These almost accidental looking white spills create “floating islands of ground on the metal” and introduce the new streams of poetic association apparent in the works exposed in Liquescent. We think of white as a “neutral” color, but the neutrality of white has been achieved through a long and culturally invested process of naturalization. Anno’s paintings stage a productive encounter between the white ground conventional in modern Western art and the less historically charged aluminum support. The resulting contrast highlights the artificiality of white’s blankness while permitting Anno to mobilize the connotations white inevitably carries (white is pure, white is sublime). [Fig 5: Rose Snow, 2008] White here functions as trope reflecting the artist’s ecological consciousness: icy landscapes melt into the sea. These are not quiet paintings. They are charged with the strange beauty of unnatural catastrophe and animated by the elemental tensions of a cycle that transforms solid to liquid, liquid to vapor. They are both more theatrical than her earlier paintings (freezing a moment in an unfolding drama) and more detached (the drama is viewed from a distant, disembodied perspective). Yet, as in her earlier wood panel paintings and first experimental works on aluminum, Anno persists in creating zones of contact between elements commonly understood as opposites. The cerebral and the sensual form inseparable bonds. The edges that separate East and West, ancient and modern, figuration and abstraction, words and images, dissolve. Here, Anno fully revels in the unruly processes of visual reorientation to create paintings that provoke passionate aesthetic emotions and, at the same time, stimulate complex thought.

Kenneth Baker review of Liquescent Show at Pat Sweetow

2009-09-26T19:59:00.000-07:00

Rising Tide: The Arts and Ecological Ethics Conference

2009-03-04T10:16:00.000-08:00

Come to Rising Tide: The Arts and Ecological Ethics Conference: April 17, 18, 19th at the California College of the Arts and Stanford University. For further detailed information on the schedule and how to register visit: Risingtideconference.org. We are engaging speakers and audience members on the relationship of aesthetics to the tipping points in the environmental movement. Our aim is to take the conversation to deeper levels of analysis and public policy efforts.

Rearranging Abstraction Panel Feb. 2009 Los Angeles

2008-08-19T10:32:00.000-07:00

Rearranging Abstraction

Session Abstract: Rearranging Abstraction

The session seeks a new understanding of abstraction in contemporary art. Much has been said in the academy about the “difficulties” of making abstract art today, and artists have been grappling with these contradictions in their practice. While giving modernism its due, the evolution of abstraction can be traced both backward and forward. In the global context, new abstract references and tendencies come from outside purely modernist aesthetics. A delicate balance of content and process has begun to drive some abstract work in specific ways. Sources for abstract art have become peculiar, mundane, spectacular, and Pop what are the results of this? How has the liberation of materials influenced new abstraction? How are questions of authenticity and originality fielded? How has content been infused into abstract form? Exhibitions such as Comic Abstraction: Image Breaking, Image-Making at the Museum of Modern Art in 2007, as well as The Uncertainty of Objects and Ideas Recent Sculpture at the Hirschorn in 2007 and Unmonumental at the New Museum 2008 are examples of new ways of thinking about the legacy of abstraction while acknowledging the dynamic force that abstraction holds. Panelists will present papers and works of art that straddle these forces with humor, passion, and curiosity.

Chair: Ms. Kim Anno, California College of the Arts

Co-Chair: No co-chair entered for this session.

Speakers

Paper title: Pretext & Context: Abstraction and Representation in the 21st Century

Speaker: Clarence Morgan, University of Minnesota

Abstract: It is time to take a close look at the pretext of abstraction in contemporary art. As one of many instruments used to advance modern art, abstraction provided painting a mechanism to reinvent itself as needed by cloaking or updating this practice in order to remain current. Painting fluidly moves backward and forward through pictorial history. Abstraction has always functioned as a strategy of engagement-reengagement by allowing painting to equip itself with various conceptual strategies. Post-modernism cleared the way for multiple perspectives in which no hierarchy or privileged stance was required. The blurring of boundaries and fixed stylistic distinctions brought about by pluralism opposed the notion of a single arbiter of aesthetic quality. Categories of painting have become fuzzy and distinctions are no longer pertinent in a world where all sorts of lines and geographic boundaries are being crossed, if not dissolved altogether.

Paper title: Looking From Underneath the Counter: Rearranging Abstraction in Our Daily Lives

Speaker: Stephan Hillerbrand, University of Houston

Abstract: Abstraction is an integral element of our visual landscape that is woven into our daily lives. Quotidian functions such as stirring cream into a cup of coffee, eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or making cookies can become larger than life, cinematic and abstract with the slight turn of a camera lens. Simple tools yield momentous abstract imagery.

Looking at the work of the collaborative team, Magsamen + Hillerbrand who use simple lo-fi strategies with video to abstract their daily interactions and illustrate concepts of tension, beauty, and emotion, this presentation will examine how time, perspective and scale affect the process of abstraction. Questions addressed will be: Can abstraction be organic and low-tech while using hi-tech tool palette? Where does abstraction fit in today’s predominantly narrative contemporary arts culture? Have new technologies, particularly video and digital photography, created a “new” kind of abstraction?

Paper title: Queer Abstraction/Queer Narration

Speaker: Tirza Latimer, California College of the Arts

Abstract: Art that engages with sexual politics frequently references the body. There are reasons for the prevalence of this theme. First, the body, we are taught, is the place where sexuality resides. Second, in societies that have labored to suppress non-normative sexual expression, the languages of dissident bodies have played a crucial counter-cultural role. This paper departs from the figural arena, however, to explore what Judith Halberstam has called “queer abstraction.” While Halberstam, in her book In a Queer Time and Place, argues that artists such as Linda Besemer have adapted “the non-narrative potential of abstract art into an oppositional practice,” I investigate, instead, the oppositional implications of queer forms of content and narration made available by abstraction. With this emphasis, I discuss work by important abstract artists such as Agnes Martin, Harmony Hammond, Louise Fishman, and Byron Kim, considering reverberations of their practices among emerging artists.

Paper title: A Sense of Place: Abstraction, Trauma & Release

Speaker: Liam Kelly, University of Ulster

Abstract: In his essay The Opposite of Emptiness ( Art Forum, 1989 ) Thomas McEvilley claimed that abstraction was always related to life, that it was never merely a search for pure form. In Northern Ireland during the political troubles the critical climate called for more socially and politically engaged art. As a consequence those artists who worked in an abstract idiom felt challenged and in some cases guilty. That critical challenge and guilt affected their work which, while remaining abstract, became more emotionally charged and physically gestural.
This paper will analyse the nature of the impact of conflict and the critical condition of the times on abstraction. It will also analyse the abstract work of selected examples of a new generation of Irish artists working in a post-conflict environment since 1998, with some absorbing and exploring wider cultural ideas but others still reflecting the residue of trauma.

Paper title: Radiance: Abstracting With a Little "a"

Speaker: Kim Anno, California College of the Arts

Abstract: As Modernism has been transformed or adjusted by the dynamics of Post-Modernism so too is the identity of abstraction. When abstracting with a little “a” one accepts the notion that the lens of Modern abstraction is only part of the bigger picture. This can be clearly seen in contemporary art and music. One of the most provocative qualities present in these is the idea of “Radiance”. Unpacking “Radiance” is parallel to problematizing beauty as Elaine Scarry and others have done. Revelry, recognition, unfamiliarity, conflict, movement, and ecstasy are all qualities of Radiant abstraction. These become riveting in visual sensation or tone. Like the presentation of beauty, radiance embodies both intellectual and physical or sensual qualities. This paper will examine the work of several visual and audio artists whose work revolves around various qualities of radiance while creating an abstracted work.

Rearranging Abstraction Panel in Feb. 2009

2008-07-10T11:15:00.000-07:00

I am hosting and presenting at a panel at the College Art Association conference in Los Angeles in Feb. 25-28 2009, titled "Rearranging Abstraction". The conference will be held at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel. For registration: College Art Association: www.collegeart.org

The session will field a dialogue of new understanding around Abstraction in contemporary art. Much has been said in the academies about the "difficulties" of making Abstract art in contemporary times. Artists create the new
"canon" and are grappling with such contradictions. While giving Modernism its due the evoution of abstraction can be traced both backward and forward. In the global context, there is new evidence of Abstract references and tendencies coming from outside purely Modernist aesthetics. Abstract sources have become peculiar, mundane, spectacular, and pop, what are they?How has the liberation of materials influenced this new Abstraction? How do artists create abstract form in their work in this contemporary moment? How are questions of authenticity and originality fielded?

The panelists include: Tirza Latimer speaking on Queer Abstraction/ Queer Narration; Liam Kelly speaking on Abstraction, Trauma, and Release from Belfast; Stephen Hillerbrand/Mary Magsamen speaking on Abstraction from everyday life and they will be showing videos; Clarence Morgan will be speaking on Pretext & Context: Abstraction and Representation in the 21st Century; and myself, Kim Anno speaking on Radiance: Abstracting with a little "a".

New Work

2008-06-27T13:28:00.000-07:00

These are new paintings from June 2008, oil on aluminum.

Rising Tide: The Arts and Ecological Ethics

2008-06-27T13:25:00.000-07:00

Rising Tide: The Arts and Ecological Ethics is a national conference which will be held at the California College of the Arts and Stanford University on April 17, 18, 19th 2009. This conference is open to students, faculty and the public. The intent is to bring together environmental activists, scholars, artists, designers, and architects to examine the relationship of culture(s) to the environmental movement. For example: How is public policy determined by aesthetics?

How did the suburban lawn become the "norm" for communities? What can we do now in the face of climate change to influence public consciousness through design? What are artists now doing today to create works that respond to carbon futures trading? What are creative practioners doing to work with sustainable materials? Questions such as these will be discussed at this conference. For information: skimi2@comcast.net.

San Francsico Chronicle review

2008-06-27T13:11:00.001-07:00