Eileen Cowin: Between Panic and Paradise

A long-overdue monograph dedicated to Cowin’s genre-bending photographic narratives from the past half centuryPublished with Los Angeles County Museum of Art.This is the first monograph on the Los Angeles–based artist Eileen Cowin (born 1947). Known for her photography, video and mixed-media installations, Cowin has explored romance and rivalry, the personal and the political, and the monotony and mystery of daily life, for more than 50 years. Often blurring the distinctions between nonfiction and fiction, memory and experience, Cowin draws on the language of mass media and art history to shape her photographic narratives. She is associated with the experimental ethos of Southern California photo-based art, continuously challenging the boundaries of various mediums of expression by infusing photographic images with elements from cinema, literature, poetry and painting. This volume surveys the artist’s work with experimental photographic processes, Polaroids, inkjet prints and videos across a half century and features scholarly essays by curators as well as a special text contribution from novelist Louise Erdrich.