Shana Moulton and Post-Feminist Performance
By Madeleine Eve Ignon
Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara will reopen in April with the exhibition, Shana Moulton: The Invisible Seventh is the Mystic Column.
Santa Barbara-based artist Shana Moulton’s multidimensional video, installation and performance pieces awaken and embody a universal inner-world anxiety specific to the Internet Age. Her work explores the need to understand both the harsh physical world and lofty energetic dimensions through movement, relationships with fantastical objects, and inter-landscape travel.
Many of her works, including the multi-part Whispering Pines series—named for the mobile home park near Yosemite where she grew up, and an homage to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks—feature the artist’s alter-ego Cynthia, a curious id-character with hypochondria, overdrawn eyebrows and short, ash-blond hair. The hair is obviously a wig, one that is delightfully similar in color and texture to Moulton’s own hair. That detail, along with minimal makeup and constant, lovingly direct gestures towards the world of her upbringing, make for a fascinatingly thin membrane between Shana and Cynthia.
Shana Moulton, Whispering Pines, video installation, courtesy of Galerie Gregor Staiger and Galerie Crèvecoeur.
When Moulton performed at University of California, Santa Barbara in the fall of 2018, one of the most impactful moments of the evening was seeing her unceremoniously remove the wig to take questions from the audience. Cynthia as we had seen her had left the room, and Shana allowed us to witness that transition with zero pretense. She took questions barefoot in a long white muumuu.
In Moulton’s videos, the qualities of Cynthia’s elastic facial expressions and body language move between the exasperation of a housewife in an infomercial and the melodramatic, wonder-filled face of a New Age Edith Piaf. There is a lot of singing in the work, though it’s much more yearning, aspirational quasi-opera—if Enya made music for digestive yogurt commercials?—than Piaf’s plaintive gargle. Cynthia is both careful and adventurous, moving away from her safe home-spaces into uncharted forests and celestial realms.
Shana Moulton, Whispering Pines 10, 2018, video installation, courtesy of Galerie Gregor Staiger and Galerie Crèvecoeur.
With an unabashed embrace of the embarrassing, Moulton creates worlds for herself, for Cynthia—for us—wherein she can safely explore and expose the things we all think about. Cynthia is an intergalactic traveler, the way we are when we surf the internet or type an absurd question into the Google search bar. She has the capacity to hold all our questions, however embarrassing, deluded or self-involved. She wants wellness, connection and the opportunity to express herself.
The word ‘kitsch’ comes up a lot with Moulton’s work, and it’s an apt descriptor for the visuals, but the work is also serious in its questions and tone. It is a wonder to see a female character boldly explore her neuroses both within the environments Moulton creates and as an avatar for our own bodies and minds.
Shana Moulton, Personal Steam, Interface, 2019, installation, courtesy of Galerie Gregor Staiger and Galerie Crèvecoeur.
In the 2014 Art 21 mini-documentary New York Close Up: Shana Moulton & Nick Hallett Stage An Opera, Moulton is interviewed alongside her collaborator, composer Nick Hallett, who references her frequent comparisons to Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin.
Moulton’s work registers less though in the tradition of Keaton or Chaplin, both of whom used their bodies for external as opposed to internal exploration. Moulton—or, more specifically, Cynthia—lives more as a post-feminist Vaudevillian mime acting out (and acting out at) the absurdities and insecurities of female desire, hope and failure in the Digital Age.
The exhibition, Shana Moulton: The Invisible Seventh is the Mystic Column, opens at Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara in April 2021.
Shana Moulton, Whispering Pines, video installation, courtesy of Galerie Gregor Staiger and Galerie Crèvecoeur.
Shana Moulton, Installation, Courtesy of the artist, Galerie Gregor Staiger, Galerie Crèvecœur and Zabludowicz Collection. Photo by Tim Bowditch.
This article was originally published in Lum’s Winter 2021 print magazine.
