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In visual art, prejudice is the mistake that comes from not judging things by what they look like. A common prejudice about painters called Photorealists is that they are obsessed with getting paint to minutely reproduce visual reality. Ann Goldberg isn't a Photorealist. She paints from photographs, but she is neither producing a detailed representation like that of a photograph, nor representing familiar things as they actually are. Not when you really look. When you really look, Goldberg's paintings don't give the illusion of reality, it's the illusion of precision. They possess a factualness that is continuously slipping away.
What is particularly germane to seeing what Goldberg does, is recognizing in her paintings the same quality that the late art historian Meyer Schapiro used to describe the objects of still-life - the "subtle interplay of perception and artifice in representation." In other words, how and what we see and the tricks we use to capture it, or in other words again, representation and abstraction. In any one painting, Goldberg subtly oscillates between representation and abstraction so that there is always something jarring or even clumsy which interrupts the smoothness of complacent looking. But if we trust Goldberg, and trust is essential in art, we give her the credit she deserves and believe that she has blocked our way on purpose. In front of our eyes, Goldberg's world, and therefore our world too, pulls itself apart and is redefined not in terms of objects and spatial relationships, but in terms of her most important values. "I see beauty and light as promise - a truth or hope in the darkness," says Goldberg. And in the continuum from beauty to hope, her paintings are like little shards of light, little shards of goodness with which the world can be made whole again. It's a beautiful poetic thought for what can sometimes look like paintings of such a mundane collection of objects. It's as if they were part of a hidden combination, that if only the objects were arranged just so, our troubled gray world would unlock and we'd be flooded with light. Dion Kliner, Vancouver, February 2009
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