Still (And More To Come) (2000)

Eileen Cowin, Work 1971 - 1998: (and Armory Center for the Arts Pasadena, California January 23-March 19, 2000 Southeast Museum of Photography Daytona Beach, Florida May 23-September 27, 2000 University of Maryland/Baltimore County, Fine Arts Gallery Baltimore, Maryland November 16, 2000-January 20, 2001 Eileen Cowin, Work 1971 - 1998: (and curated by Sue Spaid Armory Center for the Arts, 2000 40 pp./$22.00 (sb) A mid-career survey can provide the opportunity to examine an artist's oeuvre and intentions, present the development of the work's depth or unintentionally highlight its shortcomings. Part of what makes such a survey exciting is the implicit understanding that there is plenty of work still to come. Still (and all) presents 27 years of photographic work by Eileen Cowin and provides a great deal of insight into her enigmatic and influential work. Curated by Sue Spaid, the exhibition shows an evolution of style and sensibility while it simultaneously conveys the continuum of the artist's message. The 40page catalog is densely packed with images spanning the artist's career while texts by Mark Alice Durant and Spaid poetically interpret and analyze the work. Cowin is an artist who is well served by this type of exhibition. Her photographs and videos are sensuous and mysterious and for those unfamiliar with her work, the meaning of individual photographs can seem elusive--look at one picture and you may feel that you have missed part of the story. Literal readings of the works are only partially useful because the images resist our desire to simplify and draw clear, linear narratives. She sets up non-linear relationships between objects and words, gestures and expressions and between spectator and image. Her best works continue to resonate long after seeing them. In the early '80s, Cowin's series Family Docudrama (1980-83) received wide exposure for the use of staged domestic narratives that suggested both positive and negative emotional attachments. Cowin appeared in these photographs and was often accompanied by her husband, stepchildren and twin sister. Her increasingly spare sets and strong lighting clearly referenced cinema and, although obviously constructed, her tableaux were seen by viewers as moments of complex, authentic human relationships. Having achieved critical success with the Family Docudrama series it is interesting that Cowin did not choose to remain working with this single aesthetic. Instead, her work continued to evolve. The history of art and particularly photography is replete with individuals who have found success in a style or subject matter from which they rarely varied. Cindy Sherman (to whom Cowin has often been compared) has continued in a singular style for most of her career. Cowin, however, has rejected this narrow approach. By 1983 her Family Docudrama images were included in the Whitney Biennial and 10 other group exhibitions, had comprised four solo exhibitions and had been written about and published extensively. It would have been easy and perhaps even beneficial to her career to remain working in this familiar and familial terrain. Certainly in the fickle art world, repetition is potent currency whereas experimentation, exploration and investigation are, like the relationships Cowin portrayed, more difficult to interpret and recognize--but arguably also richer. From her early transparencies and gum bichromate prints to her photographic homonyms, constructed docudramas and recent videos, Cowin is a restless pursuer of the perfect still that suggests all. The Armory Center has distilled Cowin's 27 years of artmaking into approximately 50 works ranging from 1971 to 1998. Cowin's earliest photographs are black and white transparencies, some in shadow boxes, that depict layered and superimposed imagery. …