Shana Moulton
Whispering Pines #5 | 2005 | 6:32mins | DV | USA
Whispering Pines #4 | 2007 | 10:53mins | DV | USA
Feeling Free with 3D Magic | 2004 | 8:13mins | DV | USA
Shana Moulton creates evocatively oblique narratives in her video and performance works. Combining an unsettling, wry humor with a low-tech, Pop sensibility, Moulton plays a character whose interactions with the everyday world are both mundane and surreal, in a domestic sphere just slightly askew. As her protagonist navigates the enigmatic and possibly magical properties of her home decor, Moulton initiates relationships with objects and consumer products that are at once banal and uncanny. Shana Moulton works in video and performance. Moulton studied at the University of California, Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, where she received her MFA. Moulton has also recently attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine, and studied at De Ateliers in Amsterdam. Her video work has been screened and exhibited internationally, including at The Armory Show Art Fair, New York; Smack Mellon, Brooklyn; Loop ‘05 Video Festival, Barcelona; Rencontres internationales Paris/Berlin, Paris; Aurora, Edinburgh; Dark Light Festival, Dublin; Impakt Festival, Utrecht; Internationale Kurzfilmtage, Oberhausen; Canada Gallery, New York; and Bellwether, New York. Moulton currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
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#5: While searching for comfort in her self-help books and soothing knick-knacks, the cold and depressed Cynthia is transported to an electric temple that springs up from the pattern in her electric blanket. There she has a cathartic experience with a pipe organ, faces her demons and discovers the spiritual dimensions of household electricity.
#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.
Feeling Free: 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.
Featured in: Animal Mirror
