This article appeared in UCSB’s “The Current. “
Healing meets the surreal in artist Shana Moulton’s hypersaturated dreamscape in the “Meta/Physical Therapy” exhibition and series, which premiered at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City (Feb. 17-April 21).
The exhibition features a new site-specific installation through Moulton, a professor of art at UC Santa Barbara, whose paintings capture the banality and enormity of life. Through performance, video, and sculpture, Moulton chronicles the reports of his semi-autobiographical ego. Cynthia, as she faces her personal possibilities and her physical limitations.
“When I first composed Cynthia’s home space, I wanted it to look like ‘a room of one’s own’ or a cross between a home office and an exercise room,” Moulton said. “I imagined it from a certain angle and I also wanted it to be flat and claustrophobic, so the central shape of the main projection is bell-shaped. ” The whole form reproduced a giant vanity mirror.
Transforming the area into a prismatic setting, the installation utilizes the artist’s signature combination of religious imagery, medical technology, popular culture, and references to top-notch art and the kitsch of dollar stores.
An extension of Moulton’s Whispering Pines series, introduced in 2002, the commission continues the artist’s incisive examination of the aesthetics of pain and healing and the mass marketing of wellness, and explores the diseases of midlife. Presented as a narrative in several chapters, the installation is accompanied by a series of performances created in collaboration with composer Nick Hallett, which bring Cynthia’s inner world to life.
“Cynthia, Shana Moulton’s iconic character, embodies the complexities of new life. Emblematic of the far-reaching effects of mass consumption, Cynthia is bombarded with choice, through technology and driven by advertising,” said Erica Papernik-Shimizu, Associate. MoMA’s Curator of Media and Performance, who curated the exhibition. “It exists in a state of perpetual search: for physical well-being, for knowledge, for purpose. The supposedly undeniable responsibilities seem costly and overwhelming, until their limits are kaleidoscopic for new realms of possibility.
Moulton’s sense of taste comes from his mother, aunt and grandmother, he said, pointing to his knack for home décor, crafts and fashion on a thrift store budget. “Realizing and accepting this, sprinkled with influences from other formative years like Pee-Wee’s ‘Playhouse’ and ‘Twin Peaks,’ that’s how I created Cynthia’s visual vocabulary,” he said. Combining high and low culture, newer products and media, such as trendy massage equipment and MRI photographs, also make their way into Cynthia’s world.
“Moulton’s examination of curtain culture around care and healing, combined with his use of magical realism and humor, shows what it can feel like to be in a surreal setting, in all its pleasure, pain and chaos,” Papernik-Shimizu said. . ” Using Cynthia as a prism, it shows how our lives as consumers are shaped through our innermost desires and longings, and the absurd efforts we make to achieve them. “
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