Shana Moulton

Moulton's alter-ego Cynthia seeks solace from her troubles by putting together a puzzle and shopping for light-up waterfall decorations. The combination of these activities helps Cynthia to solve the puzzle of self-discovery. Cynthia is confronted with a distorted mirror image that slips between the grotesque and the exotic, depending on her posture. While Cynthia performs her nose-pore cleaning routine in front of the mirror, a sphinx appears and sings a song from the animated movie "The Last Unicorn," which laments becoming a woman. Fuelled by the sugar-free drink Crystal Light, Cynthia methodically fills a vase with alchemical home decorating items. Once her project is completed, Cynthia is again left to dwell in her thoughts. Suddenly a ladder grows out of the vase. Cynthia climbs the ladder and, through a trap door, enters an ecstatic rave complete with a techno remix of the Crystal Light commercial music.

Video artist Shana Moulton's The Mountain Where Everything Is Upside Down is even better, immersing the viewer in a hallucinatory workout room where the artist's alter-ego—a hypochondriac named Cynthia—achieves ecstatic rapture after trepanning her skull with a magic crystal. As she often does, Moulton scrambles the lexicons of new age spirituality with fitness and beauty fads to comment on mankind's desperate need to put its faith in something. Of course, these shorts—garishly colorful, freewheeling in their use of disparate cultural signifiers—succeed on the level of spectacle. Much of the work here strives for more than flashy visuals, but, in this case, that flash feels very substantial.

In her celebrated video art serial, Whispering Pines, video and performance artist Shana Moulton tells the ever-evolving story of Cynthia, an anxiety-ridden hypochondriac whose constant search for health and happiness leads her towards fad cures and new age kitsch, creating situations in turn comic, contemplative, and surreal. The mundane objects in Cynthia's world act as portals into her own overactive subconscious, wherein hallucinatory sequences explore the nature of material and spiritual concerns in contemporary culture.

In her celebrated video art serial, Whispering Pines, video and performance artist Shana Moulton tells the ever-evolving story of Cynthia, an anxiety-ridden hypochondriac whose constant search for health and happiness leads her towards fad cures and new age kitsch, creating situations in turn comic, contemplative, and surreal. The mundane objects in Cynthia’s world act as portals into her own overactive subconscious, wherein hallucinatory sequences explore the nature of material and spiritual concerns in contemporary culture

In this edition of Moulton's narrative series, the artist's character Cynthia suffers from Restless Leg Syndrome, and seeks relief in pharmaceutical ads on TV and in health magazines. In a domestic world enlivened with animated dance and mystic poetry (written and read by poet John Coletti), Cynthia finds relief in the healing mineral AION A, discovered by Swiss artist Emma Kunz.

MindPlace ThoughtStream, 2014

This video was featured in "Acting Out," the group exhibition guest-curated by Erin Riley-Lopez at the Bronx River Art Center from December 3, 2010 - January 8, 2011. The artists deliberately perform—in front of a camera, before an audience, or both— acting out their narratives and characters. Costuming, location, and props, among other elements, play an especially important role in these videos, as they provide the foundation for the entire scenario that is performed by the artists. Regardless of their strategies—which range from quiet interior reflection without monologue or dialogue, to more assertive questioning and discussion—they all share a keen interest in tackling normative societal structures, traditional hierarchical roles, and what it means to be a woman.

Cynthia plays a song.

Logo madness beam against the skull. It gets better!

In Sand Saga, Moulton's alter ego Cynthia again gains access to a parallel universe via the transformative powers of New Age body treatments and domestic objects. After applying a facial beauty mask, she moves through an environment energized with Southwestern motifs and rituals, from sculpted heads and Georgia O'Keefe-like forms to sand painting and hot stone massage. Ultimately Cynthia is transported to a fantastical world and emerges transformed.

The first installment in the multi-part Whispering Pines series, this unsettling video introduces Cynthia, the series' silent, somewhat confused protagonist, who is played by Moulton. In these wryly humorous narratives, Cynthia's interactions with her everyday world mix the mundane and the surreal. A portrait of anxiety set in a generic supermarket, Whispering Pines 1 foregrounds the artist's ongoing concerns with the ways in which people are at once estranged from and invested in consumer goods.

Presenting a domestic world just slightly askew, Whispering Pines 2 follows Moulton's character Cynthia as she attempts to navigate the enigmatic and possibly magical properties of her home décor. Moulton has spoken of her interest in the ways in which people draw spiritual or existential sustenance from banal products, and, wearing a dress embedded with a "medical pillow," Cynthia can be seen as representative of the degree to which identity is now bound up in relationships with functionless luxury objects.

Appropriating a dated exercise video hosted by actress Angela Lansbury, Feeling Free presents a woman, played by Moulton, who attempts to follow the televised workout in her living room even as elements of her home décor begin to appear onscreen. Deriving its title from an inspirational segment of Lansbury's program, Feeling Free subjects the appropriated footage to eccentric visual and audio displacements, culminating in a psychedelic dance sequence set to a remix of the program's insipid theme song. The piece was first shown in the context of Moulton's multimedia performance Decorations of the Mind.

In this episode of the ongoing Whispering Pines series, Moulton's hapless protagonist Cynthia seeks a cure for an ailment via "Healing Hands," a natural New Age therapy. Donning conch-shell-and-pine-cone-adorned headphones and an Avon reflexology glove, she listens to "sound medicine" and undergoes a treatment with Lady Nova, a hand healer. This is a portal for an out-of-the-body experience, as Cynthia finds physical and spiritual release, dancing ecstatically in a psychedelically animated California landscape.

HD Digital video

My entire practive is a form of consumption. I hit my stride as soon as I realized that shopping, home decorating, and all of the television and video games I’d consumed as a child could be a source of inspiration rather than something to disown. Today, my generative consumption extends to Google image searches or SkyMall browsing.

Sadsack protocomercialism

madness reigns drawers for me

A Victorian fairy tale told in the patois of an adventure video game, The Happiest Day is a journey back to a time that never was. Meandering through a cut-out computer-animated forest we come upon strangers enacting odd and playful rituals. These live-action sequences are loose reenactments of 1960’s and 1970’s performance artworks restaged in an Arcadian setting. The ecstatic jouissance of the original performances, with their primitivist nudity, shamanistic catharsis and pointed immediacy is re-located to a fabulous storybook world.

More than a year into the pandemic, deep-seated feelings of isolation, alienation, anxiety, and loneliness, are pervasive. Cynthia’s hypochondria, which in the recent past may have been dismissed as a quirk, has crept into the examination of our own daily activities. The titular work of the exhibition, The Invisible Seventh is the Mystic Column, 2021, shot and edited by Moulton while in quarantine, picks up where Cynthia’s journey of self-investigation left off in Whispering Pines 10. In 2021 we, as audience members, are more clearly attuned to the eccentric coping mechanisms of Moulton’s persona, as they are now uniquely familiar to us. In The Invisible Seventh is the Mystic Column, Cynthia turns her attention to exercise and breathing techniques in an attempt to counteract vulnerability. However, she is betrayed, inhaling invasive home decor objects, similar in shape and size to human organs, which take up residence in her body.

Using video, sculptural installation and performance, American artist Shana Moulton has developed a distinctive psychic and aesthetic realm anchored around her alter ego, Cynthia. Collectively titled Whispering Pines ­­­­– the name taken from the mobile-home park for senior citizens near Yosemite that her parents ran – these episodic videos, begun in 2002, chart Cynthia’s personal tribulations. They also reflect on the relationship between consumerism and the search for spirituality.

In the context of her installation "Every Angle is an Angel" presented in the Païpe, Shana Moulton offers with Nick Hallett an original performance in which she impersonates Cynthia, her fictitious double.

Girl shopping world

Inspired by the Phillip K. Dick novel by the same name, The Galactic Pot Healer is part of the Whispering Pines series, in which Moulton's hypochondriac alter-ego navigates the enigmatic and magical qualities of her personal belongings. In this episode, Cynthia, dressed flamboyantly in a blue velvet robe with green eyeshadow and pink lipstick, follows messages received from household objects during her daily beauty and medicinal routine. These messages direct her to take her broken pot to a mysterious figure known as the Galactic Pot Healer, who, headless and draped in a pink snuggie, reshapes shattered pots with assembly-line efficiency. When the healer tells Cynthia that her pot is beyond repair, the figure offers a massage and a replacement pot is poked and pinched from the skin of her back. Here, a comic, surreal, and uncanny tale takes the form of a sardonic engagement with modern mysticism and healing practices.

Shana Moulton’s alter ego in Whispering Pines 9 shows us a person’s search for identity through consumption, and how the material surroundings affect her.

Moulton again performs as her alter-ego Cynthia in the latest episode of the Whispering Pine series. Fueled by the sugar-free drink Crystal Light, Cynthia methodically fills a vase with alchemical home decorating items. Once her project is completed, Cynthia is again left to dwell in her thoughts. Suddenly a ladder grows out of the vase. Cynthia climbs the ladder and, through a trap door, enters an ecstatic rave complete with a techno remix of the Crystal Light commercial music.

In this episode of the Whispering Pines series, Moulton's character Cynthia is confronted with a distorted mirror image that slips between the grotesque and the exotic, depending on her posture. While Cynthia performs her nose-pore cleaning routine in front of the mirror, a sphinx appears and sings a song from the animated movie "The Last Unicorn," which laments becoming a woman.

In this episode of her ongoing narrative performance series, Moulton's alter-ego Cynthia seeks solace from her troubles by putting together a puzzle and shopping for light-up waterfall decorations. The combination of these activities helps Cynthia to solve the puzzle of self-discovery.

Digital video, color, sound