Shana Moulton

Shana Moulton

49 (1976-07-17)
Oakhurst, California, USA

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.

Most Known for...

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The Mountain Where Everything Is Upside Down 2007 (10)

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.
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Whispering Pines 6, 7, 8 2006

Moulton's alter-ego Cynthia seeks solace from her troubles by putting together a puzzle and shopping for light-up waterfall decorations. The combination of these activities helps Cynthia to solve the puzzle of self-discovery. Cynthia is confronted with a distorted mirror image that slips between the grotesque and the exotic, depending on her posture. While Cynthia performs her nose-pore cleaning routine in front of the mirror, a sphinx appears and sings a song from the animated movie "The Last Unicorn," which laments becoming a woman. Fuelled by the sugar-free drink Crystal Light, Cynthia methodically fills a vase with alchemical home decorating items. Once her project is completed, Cynthia is again left to dwell in her thoughts. Suddenly a ladder grows out of the vase. Cynthia climbs the ladder and, through a trap door, enters an ecstatic rave complete with a techno remix of the Crystal Light commercial music.
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Restless Leg Saga 2013

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.