Moving Towards Fire 1985

Betty Goodwin made this work on site for the 1985 landmark exhibition Aurora Borealis, mounted in a disused downtown Montreal shopping complex. The exhibition included over thirty artists from across Canada, as various as Michael Snow (1928–2023), Jeff Wall (b.1946), General Idea (1969–1994), Geneviève Cadieux (b.1955), and Vera Frenkel (b.1938). Virtually all the artists installed recent works, many of them destined to exist only for the thirteen-week-long exhibition, which became a critically acclaimed measure of the vitality of installation art in Canada at the time. Writing in Maclean’s magazine, Gillian MacKay called the show “a milestone in contemporary art.”

Goodwin’s piece brought together her acute sensitivity to the psychological and physical attributes of the raw space and her renewed interest in the figure. Here she made large, arresting drawings on the walls, incorporating the space’s visually dominant architectural features. While many artists might have preferred a simpler, cleaner space, Goodwin responded to its peculiarities as she found it, integrating her wall drawings to unite and animate it. She saw this project as a continuation of her swimmer drawings—which had prepared her for executing imposing figures on a large scale.

Goodwin was inspired by the visually prominent pipes crossing the ceiling, conduits of energy that, though being exposed parts of the building’s mechanical infrastructure, could feature as a vital organic system within the work. Goodwin activated an animate, bodily presence by repurposing the largest conduit, a heating duct wrapped in silver insulation material that appeared to issue from a nearby mechanical room and painting its curved joint red to resemble a bandaged wound. Using the inherently dramatic qualities of the space, she created an apocalyptic atmosphere described variously as eerily menacing or grotto-like.

The large figure that commands the scene is propelled across the wall while a small figure spewing from its mouth is expelled in a violent exhalation. On the left side of this composition, a red form clings to the back of the large figure as it is doubled or overtaken by weighty thick black legs on the right that forcefully push it across the space as if in desperate flight. As curator and critic Robert Storr described the work, “both sides of this curious composite image are animated by a dynamism not found in the more limpid and melancholic drawings that came before them.”  The depiction of one body upholding, or alternatively, being pushed down by another—a recurring motif in Goodwin’s drawings, such as Swimmers, 1984—appears here, pointing toward the violence implied in later series of drawings where the figure is depicted as the subject of oppression.