ACMEGRAM

Julia Trojanowski, PhD Candidate in Art History, University of BC

Vancouver-based artist Ann Goldberg (b. Edmonton, AB) presents ACMEGRAM, a gloss on commodity culture in the age of social media. ACMEGRAM, a neologism binding the Greek work acme (“zenith”) to the second syllable in the word “Instagram” implies a telos: an endpoint, a future moment at which such a zenith can be reached. It is a shifting horizon as elusive as the total satisfaction promised by the commodity. Social media platforms such as Instagram shift our modes of consumption so that the moment of consummation is delayed. In other words, desire is no longer imagined to be satisfied by the sensuous pleasure of a candy apple on one’s tongue, but in the later restaging of it for the pleasure of a viewing public.

Goldberg’s work raises questions about luxury and superfluous consumption, and in ACMEGRAM, she appropriates a model of advertising that is unique to the twenty-first century: social media marketing. Approaching her subjects from the perspective of a consumer, she restages them for her works as one would arrange goods in a shop window or for a “shelfie” on TikTok. Curator Brian Wallis writes in his catalogue essay for Damaged Goods: Desire and the Economy of the Object that “inevitably advertising has at least three functions: first, to sell a product; second, to sell an ideology or generalized value system to which the producers of the product subscribe; and third, to conceal the actual labor processes required to produce the product.” (26) In other words, a consumer is being sold a thing, a set of beliefs around the thing, and an obfuscation of the work it took to make the thing. Goldberg is candid about the lure of these shimmering fictions.

Veneers, reflections, and gleaming surfaces appear throughout Goldberg’s work. There is a significant formal challenge in representing moving water, aluminum foil, plastic, and glass—the Dutch painters had a veritable glossary of words referring to the play of light upon a surface—but conceptually, too, she returns to considerations of commodification, desire, and illusion. In her paintings, the gleam of an industrial baking tray, the metal and glass of barware, and a tin can of SpaghettiOs occupy the same category: they are seductive objects of industrial design, treated with the same devotion as the linen and wicker in a Dutch vanitas.Planned obsolescence and ever-diminishing quality aside, the commodity still manages to offer us a promise of fulfilment in this life, and since the next life has taken a bit of a back seat in the cultural imaginary, we take what we can get.

Flat, glowing planes of cerise and butter yellow are cut through with shocks of cyan, dialed up to a psychotropic intensity. Simulated textures—the paint is applied thinly—are puckered, sticky, and overlaid with ribbons of light and sharp glimmers. Goldberg edits her images digitally before using them as references for her canvases, and the palettes of works such as Candy Apples III(2024), Maraschino Cherries (2024), and Cupcakes in Palm Springs (2025) bear an intriguing resemblance to the CMYK colour model (cyan-magenta-yellow-key). Maraschino Cherries is framed like the snapshot it is painted after. There is a casual intimacy in the low angle and the lightly tilted spoon, a sense of the still life having emerged as opposed to having been arranged. The bulbous cherries floating in their syrup could never hope to taste as pictured: tart, warm, and drenched in nostalgia and summer sun. No jar of cherries on earth could satisfy the demands that such a web of associations might place on it. In any case, the commodity’s consistent failure to satiate us does not deter us from going back for more.

Ray Bans in Venice (2025) is a self-portrait of the artist. Goldberg uses the visual conventions recognizable to us from the Insta grid, including a square frame and a unique method of cropping. This composition highlights various signifiers of personal style: long blonde hair, arranged over a brown knit, and in the reflection of the wearer’s sunglasses, a phone screen. On her screen is visible a dark form on a white background, and it becomes clear that when this photo was taken, the artist had been examining her own painting of a bouquet of peonies posted to her Instagram. In representing this instance, she thematizes the changing forms of labour undertaken by contemporary artists, whose professional success depends as much on their familiarity with techniques of marketing and digital literacy as it does on a robustness of concept and technical mastery. Ray Bans sees its own future in the reflected vignette on the sunglasses’ lens.