What made Shana Moulton Famous

Shana Moulton (b. 1976 in California) is an American video performance artist recognized for modern art, self‑care culture, domestic neurosis, and wellness fantasies through her alter ego Cynthia. From 2002 onwards, she developed the long‑running Whispering Pines series, in which Cynthia navigates a surreal, kitschy New Age world of consumer cures and spiritual promises. The works combine deadpan humor, low‑tech aesthetics, domestic props, and video storytelling to interrogate anxieties about healing, gendered self‑care, and the commodification of spirituality .

Her MoMA solo exhibitions, most notably Meta/Physical Therapy (2024), cemented her reputation in contemporary media art: live‑installation environments blending sculpture, performance, and video immersed Cynthia in environments of wellness culture gone emotional and existentially surreal.

What art style is she associated with?

Moulton is primarily associated with video art, performance, and multimedia installation. Her work sits at the intersection of low‑tech pop culture referencing television, DIY video, New Age consumerism, and feminist performance art. Critics often compare her surreal narrative approach to the sensibility of Twin Peaks (1990–91) and the aesthetics of B‑movies or home video as a critique of self‑help culture and consumer anxieties . Her style marries hyper‑saturated, pastel visual palettes with synthetic domestic props, creating immersive environments that are playful, unsettling, and theatrical.

What materials does she use, and how does she make her artwork?

Moulton works across video, performance, sculpture, and installation. Typically, she performs as Cynthia, interacting with:

• Consumer wellness kits (e.g. “MindPlace ThoughtStream Biofeedback System”),

• Household paraphernalia like massagers, organizational plastic kits, loofahs, Snuggies, etc.,

• Handmade sculptural props, wood, papier‑mâché, yarn, foam, found objects and synthetic objects used in installations.

Her process often begins with scripting scenarios of Cynthia seeking relief from anxiety or physical ailments through weird devices, then filming on green screen with low‑budget special effects, and constructing sculptural sets in gallery space. She then presents video projections within installations populated by the physical props from the films, blending live performance, video, and props into immersive spatial narratives.

Signature works and what she’s most famous for

Whispering Pines series

The hallmark of her oeuvre: a multi‑part video series begun in 2002. Cynthia’s quest for health and meaning unfolds through episodes like Whispering Pines 4, 7, 8, 9, and the later Whispering Pines ∞ (2018) produced as an operatic collaboration with composer Nick Hallett.

Notable individual works include:

• The Mountain Where Everything Is Upside Down (2008)

• Sand Saga (2008)

• The Galactic Pot Healer I & II (2010)

• Restless Leg Saga (2012)

• MindPlace ThoughtStream (2014)

• Whispering Pines 10: An Opera (2018)

Her 2024 installation Meta/Physical Therapy at MoMA is one of her most ambitious works, site‑specific, multi‑chapter, combining video, props, performance and live music, exploring aging, healing, and self‑optimization culture.

How many artworks does she have?

Shana Moulton’s body of work includes at least 10 major Whispering Pines episodes, plus numerous short single‑channel films (Sand Saga, Restless Leg Saga, etc.), and dozens of installations and performances across galleries worldwide.
If counted precisely, she has created around 20–30 distinct video‑installation/performance works, with many variations and episodes, but no definitive catalogue raisonné publicly confirms an exact count .

How much does a Shana Moulton artwork cost?

Pricing for Shana Moulton’s works is relatively scarce in public records, but gallery listings give approximate values:

• Whispering Pines 10 was listed around USD 40,000.

• Sand Saga was priced ~€15,000 (circa 2008 listing) .

These figures suggest her video‑installation pieces may range from €10,000 to €50,000+, depending on scale, edition, exhibited venue, and whether live performance is included. Pricing also depends on gallery, commission, and whether it’s a licensed screening or original installation. Many works are available on inquiry (price on request). She is represented by galleries such as Galerie Crèvecoeur (Paris) and Galerie Gregor Staiger (Zurich), which would set individual pricing .

A Journey Through Cynthia’s Consciousness

Shana Moulton’s work unspools like a pastel‑tattooed fever dream inside a suburban wellness store, with Cynthia at its center, a figure equally clown and seeker. In Whispering Pines 1 (2002), Cynthia introduces herself to the viewer: under fluorescent bathroom lights, in front of a vintage vanity mirror, she takes vitamins, breathes deeply, and watches her body tremble with existential vertigo. The series title references Whispering Pines, a Californian senior park, a space of care, aging, and domestic memory, and it sets the tone: Cynthia is suspended in domesticity and aging, balancing cartoonish optimism and neurosis.

Cynthia’s world is vibrant but flimsy: colored gels, green‑screen projections, props purchased at dollar stores or thrift shops, slapped together with craft‑store materials. Each episode dramatizes her belief in kitschy wellness devices, bubble masks, glitter jars, orange Segway‑like massage cushions, and the viewer senses her sincerity: she seeks healing, peace, miracles through consumer kits. Yet simultaneously, there’s an absurd critique of capitalist self‑care culture.

Take Sand Saga (2008): Cynthia burrows into therapeutic sand, seeking grounding and stasis. In the immersive installation version, sand-colored foam, yarn, papier‑mâché niches and shimmering projected lights combine to evoke childhood sensory rooms, and yet the scene glows like a surrealist spa gone sideways.

In The Galactic Pot Healer II (2010), crystalline sculptural structures rise on wooden supports; two-channel video plays across faceted screens. Synthetic loofahs, ceramic objects, foam shapes, and a Cloud‑like shelving unit scatter the gallery. Cynthia interacts with strange pots, attempting ritual healing, just as self-help gurus instruct in advertising brochures. The result feels both magical and eerily banal, the quest for healing through weird objects.

By MindPlace ThoughtStream (2014), Cynthia dons a real commercial biofeedback headset, an inexpensive consumer wellness tool, but enters a psychedelic mind‑scape: lights pulse, gloves animate objects, psychedelic patterns swirl. The gallery version places the headset in a sculptural prop system, while film projection loops on pastel surfaces.

Her pinnacle, Whispering Pines ∞ (2018), produced with composer Nick Hallett, becomes an opera: Cynthia sings, dances, wanders through symbolic towers and pink waterfalls. Gallery installations at the Zabludowicz Collection placed crystals, statues, winding staircases, and waterfall forms. The soundtrack is ecstatic, sometimes anxious, the choreography self‑aware: Cynthia performs self‑care as ritual.

In 2024, Meta/Physical Therapy at MoMA transforms the museum’s Studio space into a prismatic wellness chamber. Colors pulse, performance sculptures stand like oversized household props, Cynthia moves between studio sets accompanied by live music. The installation is an extension of Whispering Pines but centered on middle age, physical limitations, and the mass marketing of wellness to a demographic navigating chronic pain. It is at once personal and manic, spiritual and commercial, uplifting and disquieting .

Across her oeuvre, these domains repeat: retail wellness items, cheap synthetic materials, video plus performance, feminine anxiety, hopes for transcendence, and pop-cultural low‑tech style. She represents an ironic critique, and loving embrace, of consumer-new‑age spirituality: Cynthia never quite achieves healing, but her persistence is endearing.

Summary table

What makes Shana Moulton compelling is her synthesis of sincerity and satire: Cynthia truly believes in the power of wellness kits and spiritual paraphernalia, and her earnestness jibes with our own modern anxieties about self‑improvement. At the same time, the installation surfaces reveal this as a constructed fantasy, a collision of pop consumerism, feminine desire, and cosmetic culture.

Her aesthetic, groovy, pastel, kitschy, evokes both childhood nostalgia and late‑80s TV adverts. Her use of low‑budget special effects, pastel video echo, green‑screen awkwardness, and synthetic-foam sculptural props grounds the surreal in the DIY. Thematically, her focus on women’s health anxieties, aging, hypochondria, the wellness machine, and New Age kitsch-culture locates her in feminist performance and critical media art.

Although specific sales are relatively niche and mostly through institutions or gallery commissions, her pricing data suggests she’s established in the high‑end contemporary art market. Each installation behaves more like a commissioned experiential piece than a mass-produced video work.

In essence: Shana Moulton’s artistic universe is a domestic dream of healing gone sideways, both earnest and weirdly poetic, a meticulously kitschy satire with genuine emotional resonance.