Shana Moulton at Gregor Staiger

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Equating our investment in the celestial power of "self-care" with primitive digital effects would seem to be mocking both: a particularly pleasurable bath delivers the only the filter of Google's Deep Dream, a yoga practice against belly distension births a green screened moon to the heavens. The effects are child-like, naive like the character, and require suspension of disbelief. This seems the point, any skepticism towards crystal effects, video or holistic, might render them moot. You've got to actively believe for the things to have effect, a placebo effect like a Disney ending: the point was the power was inside you all along if you just believed the pill would. The placebo effect so strong in the US that drug manufactures have difficulty time creating new painkillers that are stronger than sugar pills. The effect is not seen in Europe, or pretty much any where that does not allow pharma advertising. That this mass inculcation might be the strongest effect of all, like we're all living in a theater in mass suspension because thats what gets the crystals like art to work.



See too: Shana Moulton at Kunsthaus Glarus

Shana Moulton at Kunsthaus Glarus

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Moulton's humor in our contradictions, our desperation in searching for spiritual value in commodic life, or authenticity, or comfort, or "magic" technologies all being juxtaposed with the day's small tragedy of turning over a can of beans to read its ingredients (to attempt to glean some control over our world, some mastery where we have none, there no mastery) is amphetaminically reminiscent of Cindy Sherman's endless mockery of her subject's desire to appear, to express itself in any sort of meaningful way, bullying our desire for comfort in recognition itself, to individualize with video effect, a root desire for anything other than this life, somberly kicking us when we're down with a medical donut strapped to our ass, you so desperately want these to be funny but no one has ever made anything sadder than these post-semio-industrial kafkaesque videos, like watching Gregor Samsa transmute to Mr. Bean and die, alone, gasping for air with the precision of a comic, Moulton.


See too: Jordan Wolfson at David Zwirner

Shana Moulton at Gregor Staiger

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Moulton assuming the dress of pop advertorial address - here New Age stylings in lo-production training-video awkwardness - playing its advertising of people to themselves. It's an off-comedy in the vein of Mike Smith and David Robbins, self-deprecating humor at mass culture's consolidation and prepackaging of identity through its transference of an emotive link, here with a character, like laugh-tracks, to stand in for our own. No matter how bungling the address we desire the naive awe Moulton's character feels at "gloves." and Moulton's uses this to play against it a Rachel Rose like assemblage of effects, rupturing our affective link with it through its onlsaught of signs, tone, irony.  It's ultimate laugh is the empty-feeling that its humor ultimately lays bare.

see too : Rachel Rose at High Art , Petra Cortright at Société , Pipilotti Rist at Hauser & Wirth