About

The grandchild of an explorer, McLean Fahnestock seeks out footage, images, and items that expand our understanding of place, real and unreal, and question how desire shapes the landscape. McLean received a BFA from Middle Tennessee State University and 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. Her work was selected for Off the Screen at the 57th Ann Arbor Film Festival. McLean keeps her studio in Old Hickory, TN. 

I work with desire in the landscape and its consequences. Place is one of the factors that defines our identity. Where we are, where we are from, have been and want to go all contribute to our understanding and communication of ourselves. The landscape that we identify with may differ greatly from the one that we idealize. I am interested in that gap and other gaps that widen in our perception of and desire for place. A landscape can expose privilege and vulnerability. Places of breathtaking perfection that are called Paradise, Eden, Elysium, and Promised Land are places of desire and escape. They give power to those who explore and hold them. 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, development, gentrification, ecological damage, and climate change.

My practice is primarily in video and other forms of new and digital media. Most often engaging in appropriation and collage strategies integrating forms of digital capture and creation with physical layers and containers from craft and sculpture traditions. The project’s final presentations range from large scale mapped projections to mixed digital fabrications and XR.