Shana Moulton
1976 (49 лет)Whispering Pines 4
Shana Moulton
Shana Moulton
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.
Whispering Pines 4
Whispering Pines 2
Shana Moulton
Shana Moulton
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.
Whispering Pines 2
Whispering Pines 1
Shana Moulton
Shana Moulton
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.
Whispering Pines 1
Whispering Pines
Shana Moulton
Shana Moulton
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.
Whispering Pines
Sand Saga
Shana Moulton
Shana Moulton
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.
Sand Saga
Decorations of the Mind II
Shana Moulton
Shana Moulton
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.
Decorations of the Mind II
The Pink Tower
Shana Moulton
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.
The Pink Tower
Restless Leg Saga
Shana Moulton
Shana Moulton
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.
Restless Leg Saga
Whispering Pines 3
Shana Moulton
Shana Moulton
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
Whispering Pines 3
The Mountain Where Everything Is Upside Down
Shana Moulton
Shana Moulton
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.
The Mountain Where Everything Is Upside Down