Shana Moulton
Directing
Biography
Shana Moulton is a media artist who explores contemporary anxieties through her filmic alter ego, Cynthia. Based in New York, Shana uses colourful psychedelic performance to describe pathetic situations with humorous surrealism.
Born: July 17, 1976
Place of Birth: Oakhurst, California, USA
Known For
Repetitive Stress Injuries
Logo madness beam against the skull. It gets better!
Sand Saga
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.
Whispering Pines 1
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.
Feeling Free with 3D Magic Eye Poster Remix
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.
Whispering Pines 2
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 4
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.
Swisspering
HD Digital video
Decorations of the Mind II
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.
Lyrica
Sadsack protocomercialism
The Undiscovered Drawer
madness reigns drawers for me
Filmography
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