Shana Moulton - Whispering Pines

Nov. 6, 2026 — June 27, 2027 | Katharine B Sutphin Media Gallery

Episodes 1–9, 2002–2009
Katharine B Sutphin Media Gallery

Cynthia began as a costume. When Shana Moulton inherited her grandparents’ medical equipment, the neck braces and walkers of two long lives, she and her mother sewed the devices into dresses. Then Moulton asked who would wear them. The answer was Cynthia: a woman alone in a house full of thrift-store ceramics, drugstore remedies, exercise gadgets, and new-age décor, searching for a cure to an ailment she can never quite name. Over nine episodes made between 2002 and 2009, Cynthia took on the stories of Moulton’s mother, aunt, and grandmother, and became a version of the artist herself.

Each episode starts with objects Moulton found at garage sales, thrift stores, and online. She builds the story around them, letting a table fountain or a mood ring or a lotion bottle set the plot in motion, and she likes the collision of the sacred and the profane: healing crystals beside plastic healing tools. The objects promise relief. What they deliver is stranger. A pipe organ, a distorted mirror, a vase of alchemical ingredients, a dance sequence set to the theme song of a cable makeover show. Cynthia dies almost every episode. She transcends, and then she is back on the couch, in the ordinary world, starting over.

The series takes its name from the senior mobile home park near Yosemite, California, where Moulton grew up, and the title nods to Twin Peaks. Like that show, Whispering Pines treats the ordinary American interior as a site of mystery, with the things sold to women to fix themselves recast as charms, portals, and traps. Moulton shot the episodes in her studio, in her parents’ house, and in rentals near her hometown, working mostly alone, so the work carries the grain of real rooms and real belongings. It reads as an extension of our world rather than a picture of it.

Shown together, the nine episodes become a long portrait of a woman and her inheritance, funny and anxious and tender about the places people go looking for transcendence: the gift shop, the infomercial, the kitchen counter at night. Whispering Pines speaks to CAMi’s ongoing interest in memory and mythology, in the private rituals of home, and in the working-class and feminized materials, the care work and the hand-me-downs, that rarely get taken seriously as the stuff of art.

About the artist

Shana Moulton (b. 1976, Oakhurst, California) works in video, performance, and installation. Across more than two decades she has developed a practice that treats the aesthetics of pain and healing, the mass marketing of wellness, and the uncanny life of consumer objects as serious subjects, in a style sometimes described as psychedelic realism. Her most recent major project, Meta/Physical Therapy, a site-specific installation and performance series, premiered at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2024 and turns to the maladies of middle age.

Solo exhibitions include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art; Cement Fondu, Sydney; Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara; Zabludowicz Collection, London; Atlanta Contemporary; Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg; Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland; MOCA Cleveland; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris.

Moulton holds a BA in art and anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and De Ateliers, Amsterdam. She is a professor of time-based art and chair of the Department of Art at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and lives and works in Santa Barbara. She is represented by Galerie Gregor Staiger, Zurich and Milan, and Crèvecœur, Paris.

Image: Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.