Eileen Cowin (born 1947) is a Los Angeles–based artist known for photography, video and mixed-media installations that draw on the language of mass media and art history and explore the relationship between narrative, fiction and non-fiction, memory and experience.Drohojowska-Philp, Hunter. "Eileen Cowin Papers," Archives of American Art Journal, Spring 2016, p. 86-87. Retrieved June 27, 2019.McGovern, Thomas. "Still (And More to Come)," Afterimage, May/June 2000.Knight, Christopher. "Revealing More Than Meets the Eye," Los Angeles Times, January 29, 2000. Associated with the 1970s Los Angeles experimental photography scene and the Pictures Generation artists, her work combines familiar human situations and carefully chosen gestures, expressions and props to create enigmatic images whose implied, open-ended stories viewers must complete.Heartney, Eleanor. "Eileen Cowin at Jayne H. Baum," Art in America, April 1989.Durant, Mark Alice. "Eileen Cowin", in Still (and all) Eileen Cowin 1971-1998, Pasadena, CA: Armory Center for the Arts, 2000).Zellen, Jody, "Double Take: Narrative Interventions in Photography," Afterimage, March 2012. New York Times critic Andy Grundberg wrote that her multi-image work "sets up a tension between the familiar and the mysterious, creating a climate of implied danger, sexual intrigue and violence" in which clues abound to intimate various narratives.Grundberg, Andy. "Amid Train Data, Images of Danger and Intrigue," The New York Times, August 17, 1990. Retrieved June 27, 2019. Jody Zellen observed that Cowin "manipulates the conventions of photography, film, and video to tell a different kind of story—one that explores where truth and fiction merge, yet presents no conclusions. Cowin's work provokes."Zellen, Jody. "Eileen Cowin," Artscene, April 2000. Retrieved June 27, 2019.
Cowin has exhibited in more than forty solo shows in the United States and abroad, including at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Museum of Contemporary Photography, Armory Center for the Arts and Contemporary Arts Center.Smithsonian Archives of American Art. "Eileen Cowin papers, 1961-2015," Collections. Retrieved June 27, 2019.Museum of Contemporary Photography. "Eileen Cowin," People. Retrieved June 27, 2019.Armory Center for the Arts. Still (and all) Eileen Cowin 1971-1998, Pasadena, CA: Armory Center for the Arts, 2000). Her work is included in more than forty institutional collections, including LACMA,Los Angeles County Museum of Art. "Eileen Cowin," Collections. Retrieved June 27, 2019. the J. Paul Getty Museum,J. Paul Getty Museum. "Eileen Cowin," Artists, Collection. Retrieved June 27, 2019. Brooklyn Museum, Art Institute of Chicago,Art Institute of Chicago. "Eileen Cowin," Artists. Retrieved June 27, 2019. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA),San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Eileen Cowin," Artists. Retrieved June 27, 2019. and Smithsonian American Art Museum.Smithsonian American Art Museum. "Eileen Cowin," Artists. Retrieved June 27, 2019.Los Angeles Artworks. "Justice, Advocacy and Art," Artists, 2013. Retrieved June 27, 2019. She has been recognized with awards and commissions from the National Endowment for the Arts, LACMA, the City of Los Angeles (COLA), Public Art Fund (New York), and the Sundance and USA film festivals.Wilson, William. "'COLA' Puts Spotlight on Local Winners," Los Angeles Times, May 8, 1998. Retrieved June 27, 2019.Public Art Fund. . Exhibitions. Retrieved June 27, 2019.
Life and career Cowin was born in Brooklyn, New York and attended State University of New York at New Paltz (BS, 1968), where artist and professor Robert Schuler was a key influence.Wasonoredjo, Erika. "Eileen Cowin," Golden Age of New Paltz, Wired Gallery, 2017. Retrieved June 27, 2019. She continued her studies at IIT Institute of Design in Chicago, (MS, Photography, 1970) with modernist photographers Aaron Siskind and Arthur Siegel.Grundberg, Andy. "Photography," The New York Times, December 8, 2002. Retrieved June 27, 2019. Cowin exhibited during and just after graduate school, including group shows at the Museum of Modern Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art and Fogg Museum, and a solo exhibition at the Witkin Gallery in New York (1972).Museum of Modern Art. "New Museum Exhibit Includes Unique Photographs and Multiple Sculpture," Exhibitions, 1972. Retrieved June 27, 2019. From 1971–1975, she taught photography at Franconia College in New Hampshire, before becoming a professor at California State University, Fullerton in 1975, where she taught until retiring in 2008.Smithsonian Archives of American Art. "Eileen Cowin papers, 1961-2015; Teaching Files, 1974-2008" Collections. Retrieved June 27, 2019.VoyageLA. "Check out Eileen Cowin’s Artwork," Interview, March 4, 2019. Retrieved June 27, 2019.
Cowin's work quickly became associated with key postmodern and feminist currents, drawing attention on both coasts.Museum of Modern Art. "Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort," Exhibitions, 1991. Retrieved June 27, 2019. She had notable solo exhibitions at LACMA (1985), Museum of Contemporary Photography (1991), Cleveland Museum of Art (1998), a traveling retrospective at the Amory Center for the Arts and Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati (2000), and gallery shows at OK Harris and Jayne H. Baum (New York City) and Roy Boyd Gallery (Santa Monica), among others. Her work was also included in the Whitney Biennial (1983),Larson, Kay. "All American Energy," New York Magazine, April 11, 1983, p. 61. Retrieved June 27, 2019.Grundberg, Andy. "Photography: Biennial Show," The New York Times, April 1, 1983. Retrieved June 27, 2019. the traveling exhibitions "Photography in California, 1945 – 1980" (SFMOMA, 1984–1986)Grundberg, Andy. "Reappraising Photography's Status," The New York Times, June 7, 1984. Retrieved June 27, 2019. and "Defining Eye: Women Photographers of the Twentieth Century" (Saint Louis Art Museum, 1997),Gonzalez, Olivia. Defining Eye: Women Photographers of the Twentieth Century, St. Louis, MO: St. Louis Art Museum, 1997. the three-person exhibition, "Narrative Interventions in Photography" (Getty Museum, 2011),J. Paul Getty Museum. "Getty Museum Presents Narrative Interventions in Photography," ArtDaily, 2011. Retrieved June 27, 2019. and the survey, "Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-1981" (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2011).Schimmel, Paul and Lisa Gabrielle Mark. Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-1981, Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2011.
Work Cowin's work has been associated with two emerging movements of the 1970s: the Los Angeles experimental photography scene (which also included John Divola, Robert Heinecken and Darryl Curran) and the East Coast Pictures Generation artists. Cowin, and others such as James Casebere, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons and Jeff Wall, challenged the realist, documentary aesthetic of preceding photographers with explicitly fabricated images that partook in artifice and the boundlessness associated with painting and cinema;Grundberg, Andy. "Cindy Sherman: A Playful and Political Post-Modernist," The New York Times, November 22, 1981. Retrieved June 27, 2019. critics suggest their work influenced the later generation of mise-en-scène photographers.Goldberg, Vicki. "The Artist Becomes a Storyteller Again," The New York Times, March 8, 1992. Retrieved June 27, 2019. While exploring media and formats from staged tableaux to multi-image, multimedia installations, Cowin's work retains a strategic and thematic consistency, combining objects, gestures, expressions, words and visual referents whose charged associations probe romantic, familial and social relationships, and themes involving public and private, truth and fiction, and the gulf between representation, the inexpressible and interpretation.Spaid, Sue. "The Impossibility of Expression," Still (and all) Eileen Cowin 1971-1998, Pasadena, CA: Armory Center for the Arts, 2000.
Early work: 1969–1979 In her early career, Cowin pushed against photographic conventions, incorporating appropriated imagery and unusual techniques into her images.Curtis, Cathy. "A Movie and a Shaker," Los Angeles Times, March 24, 1994. Retrieved June 27, 2019. She frequently layered transparencies of her own photographs—often of domestic subjects—with war and news images from magazines or sewed seemingly unrelated images onto print surfaces, reflecting feminist concerns.Frank, Peter. "Evidence Rooms," LA Weekly, December 5, 2007. Retrieved June 27, 2019. Her gum bichromate prints (1972–1975) featured pale, washed-out colors that played against sensual, erotic imagery evoking the sexual liberation of the era; she multiplied the perspectives and readings of each work with layered personal symbols, cultural motifs and sewn elements.
Her One Night Stand suite (1977-1979) anticipated the conceptual and narrative concerns, formal rigor and emotional depth of her mature work. Shot in the flat, unaffected tones and color of the day's minimalist and non-theatrical aesthetic, these playfully sparse compositions offered fragmented clues intimating a sexual tryst: Polaroid snapshots of people disrobing tucked behind phone cords and alarm clocks, rumpled sheets, nightstands. Absence was a key theme, with the Polaroids and nightstands—both humble holders of mundane personal effects and silent witnesses to life's most intimate moments—standing in for protagonists. Her concurrent "Lady Killer" series similarly explored absence but featured a more direct, aggressive tone and aesthetic.
Photography and installations: 1980s and 1990s In the 1980s, Cowin continued to blur fiction and non-fiction in more fully constructed, cinematic scenes—an approach now sometimes called mise-en-scène photography—taking on a directorial mode that included storyboarding, scripting, staging actors, set design and framing.Davenport, Alma. The History of Photography: An Overview, University of New Mexico Press, 1999. Carefully controlling eye contact, the direction of gazes, gesture, expression and props, she clustered her "sets" with charged symbols and elements in order to create multiple, contradictory readings, while alluding to timeless themes such as romance, abandonment, danger, corruption, and salvation.Johnstone, Mark, "Real Images of an Illusory World," Tokyo, Japan: Gallery Min, 1987.Price, Aleedra. "Eileen Cowin," Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, Scripps College, June 28, 2010. Retrieved June 27, 2019.
Her widely recognized Family Docudrama series (1980–1983) featured consciously staged domestic moments that critics situated in a liminal space between soap opera and conceptual art.Hagen, Charles. "Eileen Cowin at Jayne H. Baum," Artforum, November 1991. Retrieved June 27, 2019. Shot in Cowin's home and cast with herself and family members including her twin sister, these tableaux evoked familial intimacy and tension (marital, parental, sibling and professional), as well as a sense of artifice that subtly undermined the illusion of spontaneous documentary. In several works, Cowin used doubling devices—black-and-white background images and her twin—to suggest memory, history, a ghostly or other self, and the challenges of female identity from multiple vantage points. The series' images function as stand-alone multi-layered works, and collectively, as commentary on contemporary American family life, the web of social construction, and the media's blurring of public and the private, which can distort personal moments into pathologically self-conscious "performances."