About

McLean Fahnestock is a Nashville based interdisciplinary artist who works who works with desire in the manufactured landscape and its violent consequences. The grandchild of an explorer, McLean Fahnestock questions how desire shapes our relationship with the land, manipulates our perception and judgement, and can manifest in conflict, violence, and ownership. Her practice is primarily in video and other forms of new and digital media, animation, installation, and sculpture, most often engaging in appropriation and collage strategies integrating forms of digital capture, presentation, and creation with embodied layering and sculptural containers for media. McLean received a MFA from California State University Long Beach. Her work has been exhibited and screened across the United States and Internationally at institutions such as the Aurora Picture Show and Menil Collection, Houston, Frist Art Museum, Nashville, Black Mountain College Re{Happening}, North Carolina, Technisches Museum Wien, Vienna, Austria, The California Science Museum, Los Angeles, The British Library, London, and MOCA Hiroshima, Japan, and Off the Screen at the 57th Ann Arbor Film Festival. Her work has been supported by grants from the Puffin Foundation, Hoff Foundation, Durfee Foundation, South Arts, and Current Art Fund, a regional regranting program of the Warhol Foundation. She has been an artist in residence at Cerritos College, Vanderbilt University, The School of Making Thinking, Stove Works, Mineral House, and The Lock-Up. She has given lectures and gallery talks many institutions including Belmont University, West Virginia University, Oklahoma University, Emory University, University of Houston, University of Newcastle, Black Mountain College Museum, and the Frist Art Museum.

 I am an interdisciplinary artist who works with desire in the manufactured landscape and its violent consequences. I explore the manifestation of desire in the world that we create, concepts of Paradise and perfection, and in our ways of communicating value, ease, and aura. In my projects, desire, not need, but the want, is expressed through the ways it has been projected onto places and things. Sometimes this is made present through the language and trappings of falsely constructed rarity. I am interested in how desire colors perception and clouds judgment, and how it can lead to violence and claims of ownership. In my projects, I center the landscape in reference to the Western concept of Paradise, and the subsequent values that have grown around it have branched into colonialism, gentrification, and climate change.

As the grandchild of an explorer, I have long considered the draw to venture out into the world to see what others have not. My Grandfather and Great Uncle sailed the South Pacific for the American Museum of Natural History in the late 1930s. Terrestrial exploration means ignoring or outright negating the priority held by indigenous people. As I have worked with my family narrative, questioning the self-assigned and institutionally validated role of explorer, it has led me to contemporary parallels in our everyday experience from adventure tourism, the use of palm trees as marketing tools, and the images that we use as aspirational to distract us from our daily lives in things such as calendars and YouTube relaxation videos.

My practice is primarily in video and other forms of new and digital media, animation, installation, and sculpture. Most often, I employ appropriation and collage strategies, integrating digital capture, presentation, and creation with physical layers and sculptural containers. I use archival films, my own filmed footage, and 3D models simultaneously, not as an integrated effect to fool the viewer, but to highlight the tension between the simulated and the real. The sound design also plays with fidelity to supplant expectations of the accompanying audio experience through unexpected Foley and electronically generated sound. The works feature saturated colors, plastic fabrication, and altered found objects. Videos can be presented as single-channel works on screens or projections, but many are integrated into sculptural works and installations as built-in monitors or projection maps. Gold and silver leafing, glitter, and rhinestones convey a false attribution of value and commodification, stimulating our desire.