Eileen Cowin

Eileen Cowin, One Night Stand (clock/flowers), Photograph, 20" x 24", 1977–8. Los Angeles County Museum collection. 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. 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. 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. Her work is included in more than forty institutional collections, including LACMA, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), and Smithsonian American Art Museum. 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. 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."

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. She continued her studies at IIT Institute of Design in Chicago, (MS, Photography, 1970) with modernist photographers Aaron Siskind and Arthur Siegel. 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).

Cowin's work quickly became associated with key postmodern and feminist currents, drawing attention on both coasts. 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. the traveling exhibitions "Photography in California, 1945 – 1980" (SFMOMA, 1984–1986) and "Defining Eye: Women Photographers of the Twentieth Century" (Saint Louis Art Museum, 1997), the three-person exhibition, "Narrative Interventions in Photography" (Getty Museum, 2011), and the survey, "Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-1981" (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2011).

Eileen Cowin, Family Docudrama, Photograph, 20" x 24", 1980–3. J. Paul Getty Museum collection.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. Writers described the works' pared visuals as "almost calligraphic in their emotional intensity," The installation, I See What You're Saying (2002/2011), explored storytelling, truth and lying with images and diptychs that juxtapose altered books with close-ups of eyes and mouths—symbols of seeing and speaking—suggesting stories that migrate from the text to more ambiguous human gestures and expressions.

Much of Cowin's video work, beginning with It Goes Without Saying (1996) and It’s So Good to See You (1999), paradoxically constricts the medium's most useful storytelling device—motion—in favor of stillness, suggestion, and commonplace, intimate gesture and expression. The videos in her show, Do Nothing Until You Hear From Me (2018), offered ambiguous, suspenseful, and contradictory images that investigated the apprehension and construction of reality and sociopolitical issues such as immigration. Cowin's other commissioned public works include billboards for LACMA's "Made in California" show (2000) and MAK Center for Art and Architecture's "How Many Billboards?" show (2010). an installation for Los Angeles MTA's inaugural Metro Rail Light Boxes project, (2001), and a 14-sequence installation for the system's Martin Luther King Jr. station (future). the J. Paul Getty Museum, and Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, as well as many private collections. Her work has been included in numerous art historical books, and catalogues, and New American Photography (1985).

Cowin has received awards, grants and commissions from Los Angeles World Airports (2019–2020, 2017–2018, 2013), Metropolitan Transit Authority (Los Angeles, 2015–2020), the City of Santa Monica (2014–2015; 2012), California Community Foundation (2012), Center for Cultural Innovation (2011), Sundance Film Festival (2002), California Arts Council (2001), LACMA (2000), City of Los Angeles (1997), Art Matters (1994), Public Art Fund, New York (1990), and National Endowment for the Arts (1990, 1982, 1979, 1974), among others.