Shana Moulton, “Whispering Pines”

Moulton’s alter-ego, Cynthia, seeks self-improvement via puzzle solving, finds wisdom in her nose-pore cleansing routine, and has her flower arranging infused with creativity after drinking Crystal Light. Cynthia’s world of interiors is brought to life by the most surreally mundane details.

“Like Matthew Barney, my practice includes sculpture, performance, and video, however I incorporate a unique mix of girlish fantasy and mature female angst. I aim to create worlds in which the goofily fantastic and the humiliatingly banal brush against each other and where the body’s boundaries can be expanded to include strange fantasy worlds through the infinite capacity of the mind.” – Shana Moulton.

Shana Moulton completed her undergraduate degree at the University of California, Berkeley, and finished her MFA at Carnegie Mellon University. Moulton’s videos are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix as part of their emerging artist series. She has shown in Pittsburgh, New York, Toronto, Amsterdam, Paris, the UK, Germany, and Sweden.

About this series:
The Interior—that which lies between, the domestic, the inner life, the indoors, the inland country, a closed circuit, the inner sanctum…

In Canada, the Interior refers to the hinterland, sparsely populated resource-rich lands stretching out to the north of distant southern cities, typically described by outsiders as a ‘frontier’. Despite a southern population huddling mostly along the Canada-U.S. border, the soul of Canada is often said to be its north. With this loosely in mind, I put out an open call for submissions for videos that responded to 'the Interior.' Despite the subtle reference to Canadian geography, I wasn’t looking for fist-pumping Canadian nationalism.

In this series, six artists explore the Interior as an idea, a vast terra incognita stretching out across the land, the body, and the mind, a swath of territory defined apart, but intrinsic to the whole. Touching on both the literal and the poetic, these videos take me inwards.
Mark Prier.