The sculpture is set back from the main entrance to a fire station. It portrays a trail of smoke. Liliana Berezowsky fixes immateriality and ephemerality with a solid, permanent material, steel. Using minimalist formal strategies that lighten the material, the artist creates volumes with thin bands of steel tracing sinuous lines and creating gaps.

The title of the work, Smoke and Steel, evokes the artist’s interest in industrial landscape and machines. The work also refers, by extension, to the vocation of the building before which it is placed and to the poem by Carl Sandburg with the same title, Smoke and Steel (1920):

A bar of steel – it is only
Smoke at the heart of it, smoke and the blood of man.
A runner of fire ran in it, ran out, ran somewhere else,
And left – smoke and the blood of a man
And finished steel, chilled and blue.
So fire runs in, runs out, runs somewhere else again,
And the bar of steel is a gun, a wheel, a nail, a shovel,
A rudder under the sea, a steering-gear in the sky;
And always dark in the heart and through it,
Smoke and the blood of a man.

This poem is reproduced in the pamphlet for Berezowsky’s exhibition at Galerie John A. Schweitzer (Montreal, 1987).

The fire station was built in 1975. At the time it served as a headquarters and was identified as the “south fire station.” Liliana Berezowsky’s artwork was installed there in 1986.