Untitled (Me looking at R) from the series Family Docudrama

Eileen Cowin’s photograph features the artist herself in a flowing pink top, and two other figures: a woman sits on a bed in a bathrobe and stares back up at the hidden face of the woman in pink; while a man is sound asleep in the bed beside her. As the title of the series suggests, Cowin plays with the nature of storytelling and the tension between fiction and nonfiction that is at the core of both film and photography. A docudrama is a fictional and dramatized version of real events constructed to appear factual: a tableaux vivant of sorts. Through the tense gazes, deliberate postures, claustrophobic framing, and realistic lighting, Cowin creates a portrait of domestic reality, and exposes the complex, ambiguous relationships that inevitably go along with it. Confusing this notion of domestic reality further is that the artist uses her family members as her actors, blurring the boundaries between truth and fiction. (“15 Minutes: Exposing Dimensions of Fame,” curated by undergraduate members of Cornell’s History of Art Major’s Society and presented at the Johnson Museum April 16 – July 24, 2016)