LYNN RANDOLPH BETWEEN WORLDS CURATED BY SUSIE KALIL Oct 6, 2017 – Jan 21, 2018
Curator Statement Susie Kalil Lynn Randolph’s drawings come to grips with the realities of who we are, a spiritual tenor both dire and redeeming. Her works have soul as well as nerve - a sustained shriek about power and morality in a new global era. The silent fear of dying informs Randolph’s drawings, which ambush us with relentless personal conviction and spellbinding strangeness. Caught up in the medical paradigm of cure, we assent to heroic measures that may deprive us of final dignity. What is death and what does loss mean? What has happened to death as a community event and mourning as a communal practice? Randolph’s drawings remind us that we are embodied beings yearning for communion with one another, that we suffer pain and loss; that we struggle to transcend our bodies and our anguish by connecting with outer worlds and inner realms. The exhibition Between Worlds includes two bodies of drawings – Randolph’s ongoing work with palliative care patients at MD Anderson Cancer Center and the artist’s collaboration with scholar Jeffrey J. Kripal on his upcoming book Secret Body. For the past nine years every Tuesday afternoon, Randolph has channeled the stream of consciousness visions of dying people. Each hospital room is an airless territory in which human beings are suspended in an alien world, a perpetual twilight where boundaries blur. The works deftly combine elements of the weird and
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scientific with acute psychological and metaphoric realism. In each case, the air is inky black, yet flooded by a piercing light. Randolph covers the paper with dense pencil marks, obsessively sculpting and shaping the figures, actions and storylines. They are painstakingly rendered worlds within worlds, promising voyages of spirits to unknown shores. Such stories suggest that we are as applicable in the greater universe as we are in a grain of sand. Throughout, Randolph builds bridges to the spiritual.
Artist Statement Lynn Randolph As an artist in residence, once a week for the last nine years I’ve gone to the palliative care unit at MD Anderson Cancer Center. There I visit with dying patients and their caregivers, who are suffering with them. These twelve rooms on the twelfth floor are not just sites of medical traumas. They are sacred spaces, and I open the doors carefully to see if art might help. I think of myself as a translator, a conduit, a means through which patients and caregivers can express images that are close to their souls. My hospital drawings are about that work, they are how I perceive some of what happens in those rooms. The Secret Body drawings were done in conversation with Jeffrey Kripal, whose new book Secret Body fascinates and amazes me.
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Lynn Randolph, Her Soul’s Visit, 2015 5
“The Uncanny Dreams That We All Are” Jeffery J. Kripal J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Philosophy and Religious Thought, Rice University Thank goodness for each other. None of us alone can be all that a human being can be. We all go through our lives with potentials that are never actualized. I think this truth lies at the heart of my friendship with Lynn Randolph. Lynn became what I wanted to become but did not-- an artist. She is my professional other half, as it were. We have worked together: first a few years ago with her paintings for a textbook on how to compare religions; then just last year on a big memoir and manifesto I was writing called Secret Body. In both books, I was struggling to write out a certain vision of the world. Lynn “drew that vision out,” in both senses of that expression. Her work has always reminded me that the cosmic condition of our humanity cannot be fully expressed in grammar and language, much less in technical scholarship. Truth is also carried by the image. True to their surreal roots, Lynn’s artworks “speak” to us much like dreams and visions-- in symbols and narratives that we can never quite fully understand (we are dull like that), but that we can “sixth-sense” or intuit. Lynn paints us, or better, Lynn paints our deeper unconscious cosmic natures, which most of us have forgotten, or repressed, or only dreamed at night. Like a paranormal event that signals or signs but does not explain, Lynn draws and paints to wake us up, but also to call us to responsibility for interpreting, and so making real, the uncanny dreams that we all are.
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Lynn Randolph, Navigating a Sea of Consciousness, 2016
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Lynn Randolph Between Worlds Works in Exhibition
Between Worlds Drawings
Secret Body Drawings
A Beloved’s Touch, 2015 Graphite on paper 31 x 25 inches (framed)
Adrift on the Psychic Sea, 2015 Graphite on paper 31 x 25 inches (framed)
Angels on Her Shoulders, 2015 Graphite on paper 25 x 31 inches (framed)
Blasted Filter, 2016 Graphite on paper 25 x 31 inches (framed)
Beckoned, 2015 Graphite on paper 31 x 25 inches (framed)
Erotic = Spiritual, 2016 Graphite on paper 25 x 31 inches (framed)
Connecting, 2015 Graphite on paper 31 x 25 inches (framed)
Hisssss, 2016 Graphite on paper 25 x 31 inches (framed)
Disfunctional Family, 2015 Graphite on paper 31 x 25 inches (framed)
In the Land of Oz, 2016 Graphite on paper 31 x 25 inches (framed)
Grand Rounds, 2015 Graphite on paper 25 x 31 inches (framed)
Leap, 2016 Graphite on paper 25 x 31 inches (framed)
Her Soul’s Visit, 2015 Graphite on paper 31 x 25 inches (framed)
Navigating a Sea of Consciousness, 2016 Graphite on paper 25 x 31 inches (framed)
Life Flight, 2015 Graphite on paper 25 x 31 inches (framed)
The Projector Projecting, 2016 Graphite on paper 25 x 31 inches (framed)
Master Builder, 2015 Graphite on paper 31 x 25 inches (framed)
Soul Sphere, 2016 Graphite on paper 25 x 31 inches (framed)
Sadness, 2015 Graphite on paper 31 x 25 inches (framed)
That Night, 2014 Graphite on paper 25 x 31 inches (framed)
A Vigil, 2014 Graphite on paper 31 x 25 inches (framed) Transitional Light, 2015 Graphite on paper 31 x 25 inches (framed)
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Lynn Randolph, Life Flight, 2015
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Biographies Lynn Randolph grew up in Port Arthur, Texas. She earned her BFA from the University of Texas in Austin. Her paintings have appeared in many texts as they inform topics such as feminism, religion, cultural studies, and contemporary art. Randolph’s paintings have been exhibited and collected in permanent museum collections and other public and private institutions including: Bunting Institute at Radcliffe/Harvard; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; Arizona State University Art Museum; San Antonio Museum of Art; Blanton Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and The Menil Collection. In 2008, Randolph became an artist in residence at MD Anderson Cancer Center. Here she considers herself a translator helping patients realize their memories, dreams and reflections on their lives through art. Susie Kalil is a former Core Fellow in Critical Studies at the Glassell School of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. A frequent contributor to publications including ArtNews, Art in America, Artforum, Sculpture and Cite, she also previously served as managing editor of the Texas art journal Artlies, as well as Spot magazine, Houston Center for Photography. For the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, she cocurated (with Barbara Rose) the landmark exhibition Fresh Paint: The Houston School and The Texas Landscape: 1900-1986. She previously served as Visual Arts Director, DiverseWorks, Houston. Kalil is the author of the award-winning book Alexandre Hogue: An American Visionary (Texas A&M University Press) and curator of the Hogue retrospective, which traveled to the Art Museum of South Texas, the Grace Museum and the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History. She also co-curated the Hogue exhibition, which traveled to the Rockwell Museum (Corning, New York), the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Gilcrease Museum (Tulsa, Oklahoma). 10
Kalil is the author of Dorothy Hood: The Color of Being/El Color del Ser (Texas A&M University Press) and curator of the Hood retrospective for the Art Museum of South Texas. She is currently at work on the monograph Roger Winter: Fire and Ice. Jeffrey J. Kripal holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University. Kripal is the author of numerous books, including Comparing Religions: Coming to Terms (with Ata Anzali, Andrea R. Jain, and Erin Prophet), Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred and Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. He is presently working on a three-volume study of paranormal currents in American history for the University of Chicago Press.
Conversation with Lynn Randolph and Jeffrey J. Kripal Wednesday, December 13, 2017 7 PM Frequent collaborators, Lawndale is pleased to present Lynn Randolph and Jeffrey J. Kripal, J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University, in conversation about art, religion, and the spiritual in contemporary society. 11
Major support for Lawndale Art Center programming is provided by The Brown Foundation, Inc., the John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation, Houston Endowment, the John P. McGovern Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Texas Commission on the Arts, and The Wortham Foundation, Inc.
Lawndale Art Center 4912 Main Street Houston, Texas 77002
www.lawndaleartcenter.org