Catalog essay from Millennial Myths: Paintings by Lynn Randolph, Arizona State University Art Museum, 1998 At the approach of the year 1000 in Western civilization, alarming, even hysterical questions and forebodings arose, darkly coloring the thought and art of that time. Ideas of humanity’s place in existence and the cosmos were shaken. As another such […]
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Moving Pictures
Catalog essay from Millennial Myths: Paintings by Lynn Randolph, Arizona State University Art Museum, 1998 Lynn Randolph situates her work at the nexus of the familiar and the unknown She conceptualizes that territory and formulates visual metaphors to suggest a narrative that precedes and follows the moment to which she privileges us in the icon […]
Cyborgs, Wonder Woman and Techno-Angels: A Series of Spectacles
INTRODUCTION Over the past several years I’ve found myself engaged in a re-visioning of the world that required me to scan across a wide cultural landscape for information, ideas. and interrogations that affirm and inform my own feminist, social, political, and psychic agendas. I have always believed that art and life are inseparable and that […]
Excerpts from The Vocation of the Artist
Part I. Preliminary Issues Chapter 3 / Vocation p.30-33 The idea of a calling is illustrated in Remedios Varo’s 1961 painting, The Call. The central figure, luminous with radiating filaments of light, wearing and carrying alchemical vessels, her hand in a gesture similar to a Buddhist mudra, leaves behind those half-awake, half-conscious, people who frame […]
Between Cultural Eras: The Effects of Postmodern Thinking on the Modernist Concept of Regionalism
Prepared for the panel: The Regional Artist: The Virtues and Perils of Being a Regional Artist. Numerous observers agree that we are currently experiencing a major shift in many of our major cultural paradigms and practices, a shift equal and perhaps greater than that associated with the Renaissance. While there may be no return to […]
The Ilusas (deluded women): Representations of women who are out of bounds
A slide presentation of recent paintings TUESDAY NOVEMBER 30, 7:30 P.M. The Bunting Institute Colloquium Room 34 Concord Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138 In 17th century Mexico there was a floating population of women who were prostitutes, widows, orphans and estranged wives. They lived outside the legitimate estates of church and home; they were regarded by […]
Essay from The Power of Enduring Presence Exhibition Catalog
The visionary realist paintings of Lynn Randolph re-examine the hurman condition in both personal and universal terms. By re-interpreting cultural symbols and using religious iconography and myth, she creates a new vision. Her painting reveals her training and assimilation of the traditions of both the Northern Renaissance painters and the surrealists. Her dream imagery affirms, […]
Secular Uses of Traditional Religious Images in a Postmodern Society
“Religion, it has frequently been said, both articulates and responds to the life experience, the ideas and the ultimate concerns of human beings and communities.” (1) These lines from Margaret Miles’ book, Image as Insight, give voice to feelings I have about religion as being broader and deeper than either most instituted religions or the […]
The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inapproriate/d Others
The final image of this excessive essay is “Cyborg”, a 1989 painting by Lynn Randolph, in which the boundaries of a fatally transgressive world, ruled by the subject and the object, give way to the borderlands, inhabited by human and unhuman collectives. These borderlands suggest a rich topography of combinatorial possibility. That possibility is called […]
A Return to Alien Roots – Essay from Exhibition Catalog
The Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, Cambridge, MA 1990 Picture a tiny medieval demon in boxer shorts and a dotted green tie: picture a middle-aged woman crossing a fertile desert on the back of a huge snake: picture a young Jew writing “credo” with his own blood on a globe. These are images […]