High-definition digital video and stop-motion animation with biodegradable glitter, stereo sound
Continuous Loop
2021
Artist Statement
We are directly connected to our world. Landscape and location shape our daily interactions. Those who venture to the edges of these are called adventurers, or explorers. I am interested in edges but even more so in the gaps that open inside our understanding. When we encounter a new place, we build knowledge of it through comparison to our prior experiences, generating a vocabulary of discovery through similarity and difference. That expressed newness can be exaggerated by desire or shaped by institutional knowledge, for good or ill. The challenges lie in understanding the separations that are present between the representations of place, the constructions of places in our mind, and visual perceptions of the visited location. Places are shifting with human driven changes to ecosystems. A chasm of perception is growing between our definition of a locale and the impacts of global climate change. Faced with mutability and mediation, I examine how location is experienced across time and romanticized through conflicting desires, the concept of paradise, and the intertwining of these ideas with our own perception of places and role in shaping them.
Artist Bio
McLean Fahnestock seeks out footage, images, and items that expand our understanding of place, real and unreal, and through exploration, question how we process that information to obtain knowledge. 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 is an Associate Professor at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, TN and keeps her studio in Nashville, TN.