dvd, colour, sound.

2009

Courtesy the artist, Pianissimo Milan, 1602 Broadway New York

Shana Moulton’s video and performance works are the sublimation of a series of fears and anxieties ¬–both real and imaginary– that the artist shares with great part of the United States and the so-called Western World. Ideal litmus for the psychophysical insecurities of her generation, Shana’s videos dig in the forms and tropes suggested by the recent past of popular media, searching for the traces of this grand malaise, a collective obsession centered on the health and beauty of both body and mind.

What health and beauty are we talking about anyway? These two concepts have notoriously gone through some pretty radical transformations in time, adapting to the changing popular feeling but also to scientific progress and to the dictates of an industry of the “Self” that has increasingly been anxious to create new esthetical standards for the women and men of the future. The ideals of beauty and health, once separated enough to allow the idealization of certain flaws as positive signs of wellbeing, are nowadays almost completely overlapping.

(Marco Antonini)