Eileen Cowin Artist Statement 1996/1997

“...for every event, no matter how trivial, conceals within itself the possibility of sooner or later becoming the cause of other events and thus changing into a story or adventure. Episodes are like land mines. The majority of them never explode, but the most unremarkable of them may someday turn into a story that will prove fateful to you.” —Milan Kundera

I have been influenced by the films of Alfred Hitchcock where the more familiar and ordered the world appeared the greater the impact of a fearful and or irrational event. After the 1994 earthquake, I mixed Film Noir with biblical epics like “The Ten Commandments” and “The Last Days of Pompeii”. I read about plagues and pinned pictures of locusts on my wall. I read stories about people in situations beyond their control.

I have continued to incorporate the vocabulary of the cinema into my work and have used video in combination with the photographs . Referencing our experience with film and television, I wanted the “moving image” to set up expectations of a completed action. The video image, a loop of a continuous action, has the same effect as saying a word over and over: it begins to sound strange and loses any connection to meaning. In the video installations the moving image also alludes to what is absent, what is outside the frame. With room size installations I am trying to create an event or situation so the viewer becomes a participant and an observer.

I have collaborated with writer, Louise Erdrich. Both of us have explored similar themes: stories that are fragmented and episodic, day to day events that turn into myths and the impact of loss and change. She shares my preoccupation with the irrational and the mysterious. Her words ground the work in the present and to a particular kind of space but with the mixing of words and images we are using language to cover rather than reveal.

I am committed to a continuing investigation of the emotional, visceral and intellectual resonance of narrative as a paradigm of photographic imagery. This is revealed in a body of work which includes photographs, video, text and installations.