Betty Goodwin at Fawbush - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

In a dozen new works, Betty Goodwin, an artist in her early 70 who is a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of admired in Canadian art circles, demonstrated the range of her talents. She showed paintings as well as drawings that involve overpainting and reworked photographs. There were statuarys too, whose materials furnished a close attention in contrasts, with works in hard, geometrically configured and zinc and steel opposing others in malleable, fragile plaster. Goodwin the two depicts and allegorizes the human material part Her figures, often rent, fragmented and multiple, pitch about about in various poses, as if in disjointed motion. Her imagery summon forths thoughts of birth, of extension and decay, and of pain the one and the other psychic and physical.

In many of these works Goodwin uses the image of an elaborately reticulated foundation system to twist the ecological and the physiological into metaphor. Half of the pieces upon view employ drawn-over, rubbed and smeared photographic images upon mylar, in which branched networks of expos foundations are equated with the compounded intertwinings of the human nervous a whole Four of these untitled base pieces are accompanied by names from Beckett and Artaud, written in a spidery script that underscores the note of anguish and absurdity. In The vigors a two-part work on mylar, a broadly delineated material substance lies as if exhausted upon top of the earth, bourn to it by root-cum-spinal-nerves. The figures is illuminated by means of a strangely disquieting sunset of red rose goldens and blues.

Memory of the material substance visualizes the absence of the material substance . In the one vividly colored work in the present to view - the rest consist for the greatest part of gradations of blacks, grays and whites, with touches of the colors - its sanguine coloration, like the deliberate seepage of blood through tissues, enfolds the bold, wavering black lines that spread across the surface. Near either side of the work there is a carbonized iron rod; one is straight and the other undulationg, juxtaposing, one time again, different materials and different states of being. There plaster wall pieces - all titled Spine - were suspended delicately from bent carbonized iron hooks slightly away from the wall. Of varying whiteness, from chalk white to a yellowish shade, they provide an elegant variation upon the theme of the material part and the human condition.

Goodwin's vision of the material part as the vehicle through which we faculty of perception the world is conveyed in an intensely focused and actual personal manner. Her bodies are one as well as the other vulnerable and enduring, the the locus of an existential reconciliation between mind, spirit and matter. Unsentimental and quirky, her art is quietly, discreetly moving.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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