Art

Shana Moulton is a California-born-and-based artist who works in video, performance, and installation. In 2002, Moulton began the video series “Whispering Pines”, in which she performs as Cynthia, an alter-ego searching for purpose and fulfillment through home decor, self-help paraphernalia, exercise accessories, and cosmetic rituals.

In her videos and performances Moulton probes, with humor, the interplay of a popular culture shaped by consumption and commercialized New Age philosophies, and an “elite” culture, exemplified in the spiritism of Mondrian, and the late works of Georgia O’Keeffe created in New Mexico. The psychedelic low-tech videos recalling the late 1970s and 1980s, and important representatives of early film history such as the films of Maya Deren, exhibit a constant “Migration of Form(s)” – that is to say forms which oscillate between “high” and “low”. In the surrealistic videos Whispering Pines (2002 to the present) constructed as a series, Cynthia, an anxious, hypochondriac, dreamer– an alter ego of the artist – persistently seeks salvation in the household consumer world; inevitably, it eludes her.

In her project Wandering Inner Eyes for AOTM, Moulton's alter-ego fails to make progress during a difficult physical therapy session. After receiving a makeover, Cynthia's consciousness, in the form of her “made-up” eyes, leaves her physical body to wander through a set of surreal scenarios. As her consciousness progresses through these stages, she discovers that she can rehabilitate herself as well as the world around her.