t 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 historical moment approaches. Lynn Randolph's paintings from the past decade offer ample evidence of similar trepidation. For roughly the past thirty years, Randolph's art has depicted representational views of animals and human figures combined in dreamlike settings, depictions I identify as within the modern imagist tradition. Arising from her body of paintings of the last decade, the theme and the title of this exhibition, 'Millennial Myths: Paintings by Lynn Randolph," addresses the unsettling forces that surround our entry into the third millennium. In these works, Randolph develops an imagist language for re- defining our responses to this new era.

Dark visions, often set in an indeterminate, inky astral space, encompass a diverse, foreboding subject matter Apocalyptic views of violence visited on women recur; in the painting "So,?" (fig. 1), 1993 , a naked and quizzical woman is surrounded by scenes of social brutality and political inquisition. The brutalizing effects of aberrant science are explored in "The Laboratory/ The Passion of OncoMouse", 1994 (fig. 20), where the central figure becomes a woman/mouse mutant. In another group of paintings, the devastating impotency and terror provoked within patients by invasive medical experimentation are vividly depicted; in "Managed Care," 1996 , the hapless male figure is splayed in an inverted cruciform position.

Each cautionary tale of terror nonetheless reveals some glint of hope through human understanding. This hope arises wherever the images provoke a fruitful spark of recognition in the viewer. In "Somnambulist Mall Walking," 1995, a foreseeable horrific endgame is visualized that the prudent among us may then seek to avoid. In the painting "Millennial Children," 1992, while
vicious hyenas, devils, and fires combine to threaten

two young girls, tiny angels ally nearby to safeguard the inner peace and strength evinced by the endangered innocents. The lone male figure in "Credo," 1990, beset by demonic figures of violence, is capable of connecting to the globe of the earth by inscribing in his own spilled blood a simple textual declaration of his faith in redemption.

Human frailty and the destructive forces society unleashes on its own most vulnerable members dominate the astral void and natural terrain, but the artist herself, through her willed confrontation with these terrifying environments and disquieting occurrences, seems to have devised a way out of the miasma. The very act of visualizing these images, of codifying these metaphors--the act of painting itself--provides the artist with a therapeutic balm: the conflicting forces are aligned into equilibrium on her canvas. The viewer who explores these dream locales thus may share in Randolph's sense of closure, experi- encing the renewal that comes from directly confronting one's demons. By awakening more humanistic responses, the artistes perception of primal chaos may yet yield harmony.