The Galactic Pot Healer

In her witty video works, Shana Moulton dives deep into her own identity. Wearing a wig, exaggerated make-up and outdated outfits, she represents Cynthia, a character who is an amalgamation of her own, her mother’s and her grandmother’s traits. The Cynthia project began with a series of sculptures; having sewn medical paraphernalia, such as an orthopaedic collar, into clothes, Moulton queried who could wear such outfits. This was how her alter ego was born: Cynthia, an agoraphobic hypochondriac who sits in a house filled with bizarre props and devoutly practises her rituals.

The Galactic Pot Healer is one of the many pictures from Cynthia’s everyday life. Immersed in a pacifist New Age atmosphere, Cynthia fondly feeds off her belief in alternative medicine and the spiritual power of objects; her home, decorated in a kitschy 1960s style, resembles an esoteric spiritualist’s studio. The protagonist accidentally smashes her favourite bowl, and all the mysterious signs that appear owing to miraculous powers suggest that she should go to a “pot healer”. The bowl proves impossible to reconstruct, but the “healer” offers Cynthia a curative massage, during which her body turns to clay and he moulds an identical vessel from it. The vessel gets fired and glazed in a microwave and he hands it to the excited woman.

Moulton grew up in a conservative town in the California’s Bible Belt. She lived near a neighbourhood of trailer homes for senior citizens. A significant inspiration for her is her uncle, an astrologer, from whom she inherited a fascination with numerology and talismans. At university, she learnt about New Age practices and Eastern beliefs filtered through American culture. Her studies in anthropology made her sensitive to reality and provided her with the tools for analysing social life. Moulton presents an exaggerated picture of the mode of living adopted by an overemotional homemaker existing in a peculiar symbiosis with objects; a symbiosis so deep that these objects turn into extensions of her body. Moulton ridicules the superstitious spirituality based on amulets, good-luck trees and chakras. From Cynthia’s amusing activities transpires the figure of a shy, distracted woman, locked in her own world and, above all, passive in the face of what lies outside the framework of her seemingly ordered life.

The installation The Galactic Pot Healer Ascension was constructed from a video film and objects that constitute the film’s key motifs. The miracle-working hands of the “healer” magically repair objects that are equally magical. Cynthia’s world materialises in broken pots and haemorrhoid pillows. An object constructed from a walking stick wrapped in yarn, with a pill dispenser inserted into it, can be seen as a reference to Moulton’s childhood memories of living near a housing estate filled with elderly people.

Cynthia, the artist’s alter ego, is the central figure of Moulton’s videos. The artist assumes this figure by means of simple and trite means: a wig, makeup and most bizarre clothes. Cynthia has all the features of an adolescent girl, including the naivety and the attendant subtle humour. She is likewise anxious and hungry for experience. She is alienated as she usually sits within the four walls of her room, the starting point of her virtual trips to other worlds. All of this is enveloped by an air of boredom or suspension in timelessness, usually born in the process of long hours of watching the telly. During such moments everything around becomes suspiciously unreal.

Even before the figure of Cynthia appeared, Moulton, even before graduation, started to make articles of clothing that were some sort of surrealist objects. The clothes featured accessories from a medical store, inserted at appropriate places. These were a cervical collar or a kind of buttock pads. Reflections on who might wear such clothes gave rise to Cynthia, a girl whose outlines are so undefined and her pose so uncertain that she needs to be provided with some shape: stiffened, supported and set in the right direction. […]

[…] the sad and lonely Cynthia, with no self-confidence, experiences events that are in reality very similar to one another. They are at the same time an ironic commentary on our ways of seeking. They are replete with accessories that sustain the so-called “spiritual progress” and assure a “good energy”: plasma balls, amulets, incense, dream catchers, room fountains, wish trees, tools for curative massages, etc. No doubt we hear echoes of passé New Age, a loose mixture of bits and pieces from the philosophy of the East and West, with a tinge of astrology, metaphysics and magic.

New Age, referred to by Moulton, with elements of surrealism and the poetics of a dream, becomes a metaphor of our inner inconsistency and mess. We became aware of them as we grew up and yet despite the decisions and choices we have made since that time, chaos persists within us. Everyone has their own New Era, an internal New Age cocktail. One thing is fixed only: the element of a pursuit. The pursuit, just like Cynthia’s never-ending virtual trips, is often naïve, childish, unpleasant, grotesque, melancholy and lead us nowhere. Yet we do not exist without it. We lose shape.

Excerpts from the essay ‘My Own New Era’ by Natalia Kaliś published in the exhibition catalogue Shana Moulton. Siła woli / Will Power, Galeria Arsenał, Białystok 2012

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Moulton, using the pad growing out of the buttocks as an element added in the evolution process, criticises female passivity and a sedentary lifestyle, which is reflected by growing into a sofa. The motif of a female body treated as a receptacle appears also in the video The Galactic Pot Healer (resembling David Lynch’s productions with its surrealism and air). Here Cynthia, accidentally smashing to pieces her favourite vase, brings its broken bits to a healer, who decides to make it afresh out of the protagonist’s body.

The cultural oppressiveness towards women is one of the issues Moulton reflects on. Another one is women’s attitude towards reality. The artist ridicules women’s passivity and points out their tendency to constantly complain. Moreover, since she is far from an apotheosis of women at all costs, she sets them new tasks to perform instead. […]

That the artist also studied anthropology must have exerted a significant impact on her art, I believe. Excluding herself from the outside world, Cynthia builds atypical relations with objects; these strange relations resemble a kind of symbiosis. When her vase breaks, Cynthia feels incomplete. Her happiness and a sense of completeness will be restored only after the galactic ceramics re-constructor rebuilds a pot out of her own body. The objects possessed become thus an extension of Cynthia’s body. For her the fetish-objects have a spiritual dimension and contact with them has something nearly religious about it. Shana Moulton conducts an anthropological analysis of the present day, which while well-known remains by all means true: the lonely and lazy home-ridden women find the main source of their spiritual bliss and the satisfaction of their needs of transcendence in the desire to possess objects. In Moulton’s anthropological analysis we can easily identify an ironic and intriguing reference to the idea of a gift. Put forth by Marcel Mauss and highly appreciative of objects, this idea in general sees things as inclusive of a spiritual component and assumes their magic power of influencing their environment. […]

Excerpts from the essay ‘Thousands Years of Solitude of Shana Moulton’ by Zofia Krawiec published in the exhibition catalogue Shana Moulton. Siła woli / Will Power, Galeria Arsenał, Białystok 2012

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