STATES OF UNREALITY
by Hannah Tishkoff
Eileen Cowin, Untitled (1980-83, printed 1999), from her solo show at LACMA. (Museum Associates / LACMA)
You enter a room. A woman turns away from a man. Spin around, and someone is staring back at you. A body caught mid-gesture. Rocks disappearing into fog. Dusky blues, smoky purples, low light. Snip, snip, cut. Moving through Eileen Cowin’s survey, Between Panic and Paradise, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), has the hallucinatory feeling of slipping between reality and something staged alongside it.
Cowin, who has been making photographs in Los Angeles for nearly fifty years, is an LA artist in a substantial sense. She grew up on the East Coast and went to school in Chicago, but came west in the 1970s, drawn to a community of artists who shared her interest in experimentation and pushing the boundaries of what a photograph could do. Quickly becoming part of the photography culture taking shape in Southern California, she spent much of her career teaching at Cal State Fullerton and has been represented in LACMA’s collection for decades. And yet, Between Panic and Paradise, curated by Rebecca Morse, is — remarkably — her first major museum survey. Her name has never carried quite the same recognition as some of the Southern California photographers working alongside her, like John Divola (whose work is also a hybrid of documentation and conceptualism), even as her work has circulated widely through the city’s museums and photography community.
When I spoke with Cowin, she described herself simply as “a worker.” She didn’t see a major LACMA survey coming, instead focusing on her ongoing artistic practice, saying, “My goal is to make images that are memorable.” Part of what makes this show particularly memorable is how the exhibition design itself carries the same ambience as the work itself. With its low light, muted colors, and swift shifts between moods and mediums, the galleries have the same strange, unsettled quality as the pictures themselves. Images such as Something Out of The Ordinary (2006) — a massive “self portrait” made up of 352 photographs of Cowin’s personal items such as sunglasses, photo IDs, and cassette tapes — seem to speak to one another across rooms, less like a straightforward chronology than fragments of a story.
Eileen Cowin, New Hampshire (1971). (Eileen Cowin)
In Cowin’s work, photography becomes something akin to directing. Photography carries this stubborn implication that something happened. Light hit something that existed in front of the camera. Cowin exploits that credibility while showing you something she herself has fabricated, making the resulting photographs feel simultaneously like a piece of evidence and a lie.
The knockout example is Family Docudrama, one of the artist’s best-known series, made between 1980 and 1984. For that work, Cowin staged scenes of domestic tension using her actual family as actors: herself, her husband, children, and her identical twin sister. The pictures brush up against camp, but never quite get there, because while there is melodrama and theatricality, there is also something too sincere, too fully itself, to become parody. Cowin turns the logic of the family photograph inside out: the supposedly candid family picture is already a kind of fiction, while something deliberately fabricated can reveal an emotional truth. Her identical twin scrambles things further, destabilizing not only what is real, but who exactly we are looking at.
Cowin was making Family Docudrama around roughly the same moment the Pictures Generation was gaining traction in New York, a loose group of artists including Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, and Sherrie Levine who questioned how photographs and mass media construct our sense of reality. Cowin isn’t typically folded into that canonical group, though there is something wonderfully LA about an artist making photographs that don’t entirely trust photographs. This is, after all, a city exceptionally well versed in performing for the camera.
However, Cowin’s work refuses to stay put in the past. The exhibition moves through Polaroids, photographs, text, multipart images and a substantial amount of video. I found myself most compelled by the still photographs, where all that withheld narrative gets compressed into a single frame. Among the most recent is the 2025 dye-sublimation photograph The Uninvited Visitor, a windy-blown image of her greying curls from behind, which takes on aging and mortality without losing the humor and visual pleasure that runs through the rest of the show.
Eileen Cowin, The Uninvited Visitor (2025, printed 2026). (Eileen Cowin)
Cowin is still trying to surprise herself. She continuously returns to the same slippery question: How do you know what you’re looking at? It’s difficult not to feel that question differently now, when our confidence that a photograph records something that actually happened feels shakier by the day. Cowin told me she is “not an in-your-face kind of artist.” She prefers something closer to a slow burn. Her pictures don’t resolve their stories for you. They leave room for doubt, projection, humor, dread, desire. There is a lot that can happen, or be imagined, between panic and paradise.
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Eileen Cowin: Between Panic and Paradise is on view at LACMA through January 3rd, 2026; lacma.org.
WHILE YOU’RE THERE…
Grab an Erewhon smoothie and check out LACMA’s Free City sweatpants collab, a piece of 2000s LA fashion lore now available as museum merch. Consider it cultural research. Next door, see work by filmmaker Bong Joon Ho at the Academy Museum. Then cross Wilshire for John Baldessari at Sprüth Magers and, outside, an actual piece of the Berlin Wall.
Hannah Tishkoff is an LA-based artist and writer whose work has appeared in CARLA, Artillery, Volume Ø and Forever Magazine.
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