Eileen Cowin

Eileen Cowin

February 5 – March 2, 1983

In my artistic practice I shift between photography, installation and video and on some occasions- performance. I think of my work as the start of a novel, the foundation of a screenplay and the end of a short story.  I want to make images that creep dangerously close to the quicksand of the romantic, images that slid ever so gently under the skin like a surgeon’s scalpel. I am interested in the fine line between public and private, the representation of intimacy, the exploration of the familiar and the emotional content of the mundane. For the almost forty years I have been making work, I have been interested in relationships including: word/image, the familiar/the unknowable, cause/effect, surveillance/voyeurism, observer/observed and reality/fiction, personal/public

Eileen Cowin‘s (b. New York) work has been presented in over 30 solo exhibitions and in more than 180 group exhibitions. Cowin has received numerous awards, among them are three Individual fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), a commission from the Public Art Fund in New York, a City of Los Angeles (C.O.L.A.) Individual Artist Fellowship, an Artist’s Fellowship in New Genres from the California Arts Council, the California Community Foundation’s (CCF) Fellowship for Visual Artists, City of Santa Monica Artist’s Fellowship, Best Experimental Film USA Film Festival, MTA Metro Art, Art Matters, NY, three commissions from Los Angeles World Airports and a commission for the Martin Luther King Jr. Metro Station in Los Angeles. Cowin’s work is included in major public and private collections including: the Brooklyn Museum, NY, the J.Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. the Brooklyn Museum, the National Museum of American Art, Seattle Art Museum, and MOCA, Los Angeles.