video installation, 2023 

Title from a poem by June Jordan.  (Coming soon at UCR Arts/California Museum of Photography. Telling them Apart: Eileen Cowin and Jonesy  January 27, 2024- July 21, 2024

TEARS STRUGGLING TO BREAK FREE

by Rosanna Albertini

Nine minutes. Clock’s minutes are haunting my mind. I shake my head after watching Eileen’s video installation many many times. A sense of hunger stirs my chest, lack of equal, adequate words. As I shake my head a small purple flower falls on the table from my hair.  The jacaranda  sheds her flowers, finally weak and tired. What’s your time, lady tree? Do you ever cry?

The nine minutes as a viewer vanish in a stunned disbelief. “reaching for you” says the title, “whoever you are,” and the gallery starts. Portraits of feelings that bring me in a strange anatomic theater. Living people, prisoners of intact features, reveal  the internal, invisible cracks, slowly letting them transform lips, eyes while they wonder, they wonder what’s happening around which makes it so hard to hold and hide their feelings.

 Yet each character becomes a portrait of a real person struggling with feelings. It is what blows up my mind. I do know they are artificial, actors, directed…in reality, their emotional expression is measured and controlled, perfectly timed, but they are not fake. One by one undecided, surprised, sad, lightly smiling, perplexed, searching through a space of separation, each of them inside a place of their own, framed inside a screen, despite the homy environment they are each on a different planet. Living a time set up by who they are as humans. To call it identity doesn’t really work, it would block the vision of them in a consolidated quality maybe good for stones. Sediment? The face left on them from the running of life? 

In this artpiece, mysteriously, art and philosophy hold hands. Readers, the piece will be visible for the public beginning January 27, 2024 at the UCR Arts/California Museum of Photography. In the meantime one can think about it. Yes, out of date, isn’t it? Please, don’t give up thinking. And feeling. 

Eileen Cowin in her restrained, ecliptic style  -the same of her photographs-  erasing, obscuring most details, gives us an explosion of humanity that goes directly to our guts, bypassing the brain. Feelings are a thing of the body. Solitude is not the absence of somebody we could burn for or by whom we feel vaguely attracted not knowing why.

Let me tell you the thought first, as a sort of fantasy, and the name of the philosopher later. He might be a poet more than a philosopher… On his planet, solitude is tragic only because humans are captured inside the physicality of their existing, what we call identity. A body, a face, our unique home. All life long we feel there is something unique in our physical person that we can’t completely identify: us. That sense of us never changes, as if time didn’t exist. The mind doesn’t have power over that part of us. Like a dream of our inner soul? No word can say.

  “Solitude is an absence of time” wrote my philosopher friend, and “the companion of our daily existence.” Eileen’s portraits are exactly there. Their feelings try to reach the other person who could be the beginning of a different time, not a future, just something that is about to happen or not at all. The interesting side is the border-time around the person, an infinite uncertainty whose space opens to hope. The face to face is the key moment, the border can be trespassed, time can start. Relations between humans are the condition of time. The caresse, a promise without a future.  Honor to my friend Emmanuel Levinas who already moved out, to the Elysian fields. 

But also honor to Eileen Cowin. Despite the clear separation of her characters in a struggle to break their isolation, she introduced such a tension in each of them that quite often tears come into their eyes, and run down on their cheeks. So many tears. Fluid as words couldn’t be, warm and wet, like the brain. 

Hope is in those tears, before human time dries them up and prepares more, to soften the wounds of life.