Whispering Pines 3

MindPlace ThoughtStream, 2014

HD Digital video

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.

Girl shopping world

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.

Sadsack protocomercialism

Digital video, color, sound

Logo madness beam against the skull. It gets better!

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.

madness reigns drawers for me

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.