Review: Eileen Cowin is a 'wry disruptor' in expansive new LACMA retrospective

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Set us as preferred “Between Panic and Paradise,” Eileen Cowin’s penetrating retrospective at LACMA, begins in the present, with large, recent color photographs and her newest work, a stirring video.The show then veers back to early work, photographic transparencies with magazine transfers made in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, and continues, gallery by gallery, oscillating between different periods of the artist’s nearly six-decade career.By deviating from straightforward chronology, the installation resonates smartly with one of Cowin’s key operating principles — that we don’t experience time as a continuous line moving in one direction, but as episodic, fragmented, interrupted, layered.

Clock hands circle predictably and calendar pages turn on schedule, but internally, within our bodies, minds and hearts, time is a whole different thing — discontinuous, wondrous, searing.Cowin was born in Brooklyn in 1947 and attended graduate school at the Institute of Design in Chicago.She began teaching on the East Coast, and showing work that combined photographic imagery with printmaking techniques, collage and stitching.

In 1975 she settled for good in Los Angeles, home base to Robert Heinecken, one of the most consequential practitioners of material experimentation in photography.It was an especially fertile period for photography, and L.A.

artists were catalytic in elevating the medium’s stature and expanding its range.Entertainment & Arts Eileen Cowin is a noted L.A.

photo and video artist in midcareer.Cowin soon shifted to straighter technical methods applied to crooked storylines.

She’s become most influential for her staged photography, choreographed decisive moments shot in both color and black and white.In her lauded “Family Docudrama” series (1980-84), Cowin cast herself, her husband and ste...