While Betty Goodwin’s “Swimmers,” 1982-85, and “Carbon Series,” 1986, with their free-floating, visually truncated figures have a note of tragic finality to them, the “Nerve Series,” 1993, seems more open-ended. Here, her usual allegorization of the human figure has been tempered by real-life photos of exposed root systems transferred onto Mylar and then reworked. The imagery Goodwin has chosen here seems more potent and mysterious precisely because it is more explicit. These works allow us to imagine our own inner feelings about the process of birth, life, death, and decay in an open-ended,