Eileen Cowin

(The Armory Center of the Arts, Pasadena) Twenty-seven years of work by the photographer/video artist Eileen Cowin is presented in the retrospective exhibition Still (and all). Cowin makes photographic works that tell stories both through images and through image/text relationships. In looking at how her work has developed over the years, it becomes evident that she has moved from staging photographic tableaux to exploring how narrative is created. This is accomplished through the juxtaposition of seemingly disparate images that include single objects or focus on an expression. Cowin has also begun to implement video and video projection into her works, forming even more complex relationships.

In I'll Give You Something To Cry About [1998], she presents a grid of twelve large color photographs. Here fragments and gestures--faces, a bloody thorn, a handful of letters--begin to tell a story. The title suggests one reading and the photographs, seen as individual images as well as in relation to one another, describe a possible scenario. Cowin deliberately leaves gaps. She does not tell us the whole story. We must read between the lines (or the images) to ascertain meaning.

Cowin is a master of her medium. She is in total control and leaves nothing to chance. Even if an image looks candid she hints that it is staged, often leaving the evidence--lights, camera, tripod--in the photograph. Cowin's work explores the moments in between. She is as interested in the moment the camera records as what might have happened offstage. She constructs narratives either within a single image or across multiple frames that explore these ambiguities.

In Family Docudrama [1980-83] she photographed her husband, twin sister and step children, creating an intriguing and open-ended narrative. Here lovers embrace, dance, confront themselves and act out their parental duties aware, but unfazed that these actions are being performed for the camera. As always, an emotionally charged situation is portrayed. She is particularly interested in the relationship between men and women, although in a number of works individuals also seem to be battling their own demons.

After spending a number of years exploring what the still image, both alone and in sequence could communicate, Cowin has begun to experiment with video. At first she created video images that appeared to be still. In A Form of Ecstasy [1994] she presents four black and white back-lit images in a row, all the same size. It takes some time to realize that one is a moving image, a projected video, juxtaposed against three still photographs. Reading from left to right within the darkened space you see a photograph of a pen resting on an almost empty notebook. The next image is a close-up of a woman's lips. The third a blurry frame from a TV picturing clouds and a field, and the fourth is an image of stuffed owls. Upon close examination you will notice the woman's lips move ever so slightly. Here Cowin uses the video camera not to create narrative, but to create the illusion of immobility.

EILEEN COWIN