Millennial Myths: Paintings by Lynn Randolph organized by the Arizona State University Art Museum examines “metaphoric realism” paintings by Lynn Randolph. The exhibition, curated by Marilyn A. Zeitlin, opens on February 21, 1998 and closes on May 24, 1998. Randolph’s works bring together ideas of art, science and technology executed since 1989, reflecting her interest in radical science, the body, and visions of the future. It displays an array of the iconographic vocabulary that she has developed to dramatize ideas in compelling visual terms. Randolph has honed a style that she calls “metaphoric realism,” that presents the visionary in vividly tangible terms, giving the work an intensity and edge that satisfy the longing for images of the unknown. The vision hovers between the novelist Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and the films of Andrei Tarkovshy or Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner. In fact Rachel in Bladerunner, a cyborg with emotional capacity for fear, love, and confusion, personifies [sic] much of Randolph’s notion that the changes that science will bring need not be regarded as invasions of the mind and body snatchers. Randolph most clearly aligns herself with artists as the visual translator of the unseen. Her artistic kinships are with Frida Kahlo and Remedios Varo, William Blake, Jan Van Eyck, Rene Magritte, Georgia O’Keeffe, Hieronymus Bosch, Francisco de Goya, Pierre Bonnard (for his iridescent color), medieval manuscript illuminators and painters of Mexican Ex votos and retablos .
A catalogue will include essays by Donna Haraway, David Hopps, and Marilyn Zeitlin, and a text by the artist. Haraway’s publications include Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (Routledge: 1989), Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Routledge: 1991), and more recently, Modest Witness (Routledge), which includes many of Lynn Randolph’s paintings. Haraway is a Professor of the History of Science at University of California, Santa Cruz. Marilyn Zeitlin’s most recent publications include Too Late for Goya:
Works by Francesc Torres (1993), Art Under Duress: El Salvador 1980-Present (1994), and Bill Viola: Buried Secrets (1995).
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