Nevermore appears to depict a high school classroom. Desks and chairs are arranged in rows; a schoolgirl floats facing the blackboard. Three legs are visible. The third drifts in the air, seemingly detached from the figure — only gradually does its form and color reveal it as her own. She appears as Yatagarasu, the three-legged crow of the Kojiki, Japan's oldest mythological chronicle. Dressed in a school uniform, she floats in this classroom, one hand pointing toward the Hinomaru drawn on the blackboard. Its corner droops.

In Edgar Allan Poe's poem, the raven speaks only one word: Nevermore. Never again, no more. The raven, answering every question with the same reply, holds no language of hope. In Nevermore, that declaration enters the air of the classroom. In a place that should lead toward the future, a mythological bird points to an old symbol.

Yatagarasu is, above all, a bird that shows the way. It once guided this nation. But does the path it now points to lead anywhere? No answer is given. The uncertainty young people feel about where they are headed, the question of this country's future, settles quietly inside the misaligned lines.

Kano begins with a primed wood panel, printing silkscreen onto its surface. The screen carries lines only; color is applied directly by hand. The panel is then ground. Borrowing from togi-makie — a traditional lacquerware technique in which layers are built up and carefully sanded to reveal the material beneath — she works the surface down, then lays silkscreen over it once more. This alternation of grinding and printing inscribes misalignment into the work. Lines that register exactly and lines that slip coexist in the same picture plane, making visible through technique itself the gap between the artist's perception and what the world sees.