‘Designed to make you breathe’ – Shana Moulton at Zabludowicz

Walk into the Zabludowicz Gallery and you enter a spa. A rehab centre, a cult. Here are two of my fellow neophytes now, with dry ice rolling around their ankles. They are standing at the base of a waterfall, as projected on what used to be an altar (the building, historically, a Methodist Chapel).

Everything on the surface — from the dreamy synth harp picking gentle arpeggios to the water features and ferns — seems designed to make you breathe: ahhhhh… 

Walk into the Zabludowicz Gallery and you enter a spa

But where there is relief, there is its prerequisite: anxiety and distress. 

This is Shana Moulton’s exhibition, Whispering Pines — a fitting name for our innocuous health club, until you consider the prospect of trees that whisper behind your back. There are two ‘clock-eyes’ framing the waterfall I mentioned, and they are watching me. The ferns aren’t meditative wall ornaments, but tears falling from the eyes: ‘The Waterfall of Grief’ (2019). 

This is the kind of paranoia you could imagine troubling Moulton’s alter-ego, Cynthia, who provides an anchor for the show, whilst appearing anything but anchored herself. Anxious, agoraphobic, Cynthia seems not only a shut-in, but like she got trapped in the 80s, with her heavy aqua eye shadow and immovable, Lego hair.

She drifts off / she falls to pieces. For instance, in ‘Whispering Pines 10’, Cynthia can be found Catherine-wheeling through the cosmos in a pastel pullover gown, only to smack down on a roof as a smashed mannequin. 

Anxious, agoraphobic, Cynthia seems not only a shut-in, but like she got trapped in the 80s

Then there’s a video at the base of the ‘The Pink Tower’ — a tall, fuchsia obelisk based on children’s building blocks — in which a daydreaming Cynthia dives from the topmost window and is shredded like paper.

In both cases our heroine is killed; resurrected. We’ve all grown up on a diet of damsels in distress (angels) and madwomen in attics (monsters): picking up the baton from Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, who wrote the seminal book titled The Madwoman in the Attic, Moulton is here reading and overwriting Saint Barbara and Rapunzel. The rallying call is to kill these tropes — kill the ‘angel’, kill the ‘monster’, or at least reclaim them. 

Beneath the stereotypes, the kitsch, the irony, Cynthia is searching for meaning and self-actualisation. She’s the madwoman, she’s the angel, she’s Cynthia; her distress is her own. Sure, she’s the proud owner of a giant Slinky and a lamp with dolphins on it, which she brushes every morning with a rainbow feather duster, but she’s looking for a way out of worry and routine.

Nonetheless, Cynthia’s tale is cautionary: sometimes our search for relief (Cynthia’s compulsive dusting, for instance) further entraps us in patterns of distress. The dolphin lamp, the bubble machine and New Age ornaments, suddenly floating, surround Cynthia. 

Beneath the stereotypes, the kitsch, the irony, Cynthia is searching for meaning and self-actualisation

Even self-care can be harmful. See: the patriarchal capitalist wellness industry that thrives on an underlying fear of death; a bevy of hungry cartoon birds pecking at Cynthia’s peanut butter body mask. Even when her quest for spiritual enlightenment takes her to the stars — Durga-armed and air-punching — Cynthia always comes crashing down to the same-old, same-old. 

So, the search for meaning, counterintuitively, results in a kind of purposeless vacancy. The search for relief, in the intensification of its need. How to exit the loop? One of Cynthia’s strategies in ‘Personal Steam Interface’ (2019) is a millennial fail-safe: Google it. But the algorithms aren’t primed for such profound questions and throw back things like ‘who do I look like?’ and ‘how old is Jennifer Lopez?’

In ‘Whispering Pines 10’, Cynthia wakes to a libretto welcoming her to the day: ‘Good morning to you oo oo ooh / There’s so much to do.’ Now whether those lines fill you with excitement or dread might depend on your current cortisol levels, but in Cynthia’s case, there’s a delicious and tragic irony. 

When considered from our 2019 perspective, a time of more and more self-imposed tasks and metrics of our own making, Cynthia seems to have very little to do. Instead, she’s been plucked out of the story we all know backwards — the heroine’s lack of agency, needs, wants, backstory — and pushed to disrupt her own inertia, an archetype given the dictum: know thyself. After all, we all know no-one is galloping in on a white horse.

The Shana Moulton exhibition runs at the Zabludowicz Collection until 15th December