Sand Saga by Shana Moulton, a ten-and-a-half minute video with a family resemblance to Moulton’s own Whispering Pines video series, is the story of a vision quest through a landscape involving not the traditional natural environment of the Native American vision quest, but rather a mishmash of the natural environment, new age kitsch, mirrors, vaginal Georgia O’Keefe iconography, archetypal myth, psychoactive skin creams, digital effects, time travel portals, and an extended hallucinatory state.
The narrative opens with two views of Moulton’s alter ego, Cynthia, viewing her own represented reflection in, first, a large bathroom mirror, and, second, a small personal mirror which (due to its ability to magnify facial details) morphs her face, stretching it and compressing it into bizarre forms.
Cynthia, then, returns to her reflection in the larger mirror as she applies a brown-green facial mask while, in the meantime, various objects in the bathroom–a Georgia O’Keefe “cow skull” poster as well as masks and sculptural busts depicting mythological figures–look on.
After putting on the finishing touches, she turns over an hourglass and, as the sands of time drip away, Cynthia—continuing to stare into her own reflection—watches the facial mask transform into a portal which itself leads to a lush landscape in which a shamanic figure drips sand onto a Native American sand painting (perhaps there is a Jackson Pollock reference here).
The shaman, represented to Cynthia as herself wearing an O’Keefe cow skull mask and a red jump suit, directs her to lie down on the painting as she applies consumer-quality massage gadgetry and polished black stones to Cynthia’s back.
Through the stages of this ritual, the shaman is able to extract both symbolic representations of blockages to Cynthia’s chakras as well as a contact lens from her eye–actions which, then, set off a cathartic, carnivalesque montage composed of dancing figures wearing mythological masks in the midst of a blissful void space composed of imagery from O’Keefe’s flower paintings.
This montage, accompanied by rhythmic new age music, continues for roughly three of the video’s ten-and-a-half minutes and, then, in a final scenario, Cynthia returns to her bathroom as “a new woman” and proceeds to eat her facial mask, taking what was initially a synthetic cover to her face and ingesting it, symbolically destroying it by absorbing it into herself.
Now, on the one hand, Sand Saga is a bildungsromant in which a young, seemingly dissatisfied character gains confidence through a mystical journey into the archetypal depths of herself.
On the other hand, though, the constant, knowingly jokey references to borderline quackery, “cheesy” special effects, and sham new age commodity culture casts the sincerity of this vision quest thesis into doubt—like, oh, it’s all a joke.
So which is it?
Well, at a recent artist’s talk at E.A.I., Moulton made several references to the television series Twin Peaks, citing it as an inspiration and ironically claiming that her own best video was a remake of the “Black Lodge” scenes from the final Twin Peaks episode which she made as an adolescent (unfortunately, that tape is now lost).
The appeal of Twin Peaks at the height of its meteoric rise in the 1990s was its tone of, on the one hand, absolute vulnerability and sincerity, and, on the other hand, absolute detached coolness and irony.
The viewer of Twin Peaks is invested in following the case of “Who Killed Laura Palmer?” not because they intrinsically care about Laura Palmer nor because they care about the show’s detached hipster humor, but rather because of the satisfactory collision between these two elements in which it’s impossible to tell which one is the true Twin Peaks.
Similarly, Moulton’s videos are perhaps best considered as operating in the cracks of a collision between sincerity and irony and a lot of that has to do with Moulton’s skills as a performer.
Like Kyle MacLachlan in the role of Special Agent Dale Cooper before her, if one views Moulton’s character enough, it doesn’t matter if she’s serious or goofing or if the truth will ever be revealed; the pleasure is in following her figure it all out for herself.