Whispering Pines 10: Phase I

Whispering Pines 10: Phase I
CANADA 331
June 1 - July 15

Opening Reception: Friday June 1, 6-8 PM

Whispering Pines 10, the long-awaited continuation of Shana Moulton's celebrated video series, is a cross-platform opera collaboration with composer Nick Hallett. Phase I, its first sequence of videos, is on display in the viewing room at CANADA 331.

The mountainous, California landscape around the trailer park near Yosemite where Shana Moulton was raised, serves as a backdrop to her Whispering Pines video series. In nine episodes dating back to 2002, Moulton appears as Cynthia--hypochondriac, agoraphobic, and prone to surreal fantasies. Cynthia's attempts to escape pain yield only fad cures; her quest for enlightenment leads to new-age kitsch.

For this tenth episode, Moulton's performance is accompanied by an original musical score and libretto from composer Nick Hallett, who appears in the videos, along with vocalists Daisy Press and Katie Eastburn. The video is adapted from Moulton and Hallett's electronic opera, which was developed at The Kitchen, Harvestworks, and the New Museum, and subsequently toured art museums and performance festivals across the US. The duo received a Creative Capital grant to reshape Whispering PInes 10 for the internet. The project is simultaneously presented as a digital exhibition with New Museum/Rhizome First Look at www.whisperingpines10.com.

Shana Moulton is a California-born and based artist, who works in video, performance, and installation.  In 2002, she began the video series Whispering Pines, in which she performs as Cynthia, both an alter-ego and an avatar for the artist when she is alone.  Moulton has had solo exhibitions at the Palais De Tokyo, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Fondazione Morra Greco, Kunsthaus Glarus, and a retrospective of work at The Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg.  She has performed and screened videos at MoMA, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, Performa 2009, The Kitchen, Art in General, The Andy Warhol Museum, SFMOMA, The Hammer Museum, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, and Cricoteka, among many others.  Moulton’s artistic process and the development of Whispering PInes 10 was profiled by Art21’s New York Close Up series.  Her videos (including Whispering Pines 1 through 9) are distributed by EAI.

Nick Hallett is a Brooklyn-based composer, vocalist, and cultural producer working between the worlds of sound, art, and performance. "He draws on a wide range of seemingly contrasting musical genres—from indie rock to early Romantic to electronica to opera—to create arrangements that deploy the voice as an instrument." (Art21).  His music has been presented in New York at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, Ecstatic Music Festival, Hayden Planetarium, The Public Theater, Town Hall, Performa, The Kitchen, Roulette, and National Sawdust, among many others. Hallett recently completed work on a trilogy of dance-theater scores for choreographer-director Bill T. Jones’s Analogy cycle, which he has been touring with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company for the past three years.  He received a 2017 New York Dance & Performance "Bessie" award for his music in Variations on Themes from Lost & Found, a reconstruction of work by choreographer John Bernd (1953-1988).  Hallett is the music director of the Joshua Light Show and co-directs the Darmstadt new music series.