MFA California State University Long Beach
BFA Middle Tennessee State University |
McLean Fahnestock is a media artist who works in video, sound, sculpture, and digital collage. McLean reclaims material from institutions, seeking out footage, images, and items that intimate place and carry the trappings of exploration. Her work has been exhibited and screened across the United States and Internationally at institutions such as the 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 included in a DVD compilation of short videos by the LA Film Forum. She was a finalist for a 2012 Vimeo Video Award and was named “Most Promising New Artist” at MADATAC 5, in Madrid, Spain. |
I am a media artist who works across modes of communication, from video and photographic images to sound, text, and display. Inspired by the presentation modes that are found in the institutions that specialize in the delivery of knowledge – museums, libraries, and the media. I consider each of these and their roles and contrast them with heuristic experiential modes of acquiring knowledge. I mine these same locations and their archives for the materials that I utilize in my work.
My projects are concerned with exploration. Using my own family legacy as a footpath I am tracing the arc of exploration from the first spark that motivates an adventure to the final resting place of the ephemera and the propagation of the mythic character. Specifically I am examining South Pacific exploration through the lens of my Grandfather and Great Uncle’s voyages. They sailed the South Seas for the American Museum of Natural History in the late 1930’s – early 1940’s until they wrecked their ship upon the Great Barrier Reef. Artifacts and recordings from the expeditions are found in several museum and library collections.
My explorations begin in the institutions that house the archives and tell the tales of these acts and expand out in to the field, re-imagining and representing material. I am drawn to the character of the explorer and their singular focus on frontiers in spite of risk, death, and failure -- the possibility that they could see something authentically new that could then lead to a place in history.
My projects are concerned with exploration. Using my own family legacy as a footpath I am tracing the arc of exploration from the first spark that motivates an adventure to the final resting place of the ephemera and the propagation of the mythic character. Specifically I am examining South Pacific exploration through the lens of my Grandfather and Great Uncle’s voyages. They sailed the South Seas for the American Museum of Natural History in the late 1930’s – early 1940’s until they wrecked their ship upon the Great Barrier Reef. Artifacts and recordings from the expeditions are found in several museum and library collections.
My explorations begin in the institutions that house the archives and tell the tales of these acts and expand out in to the field, re-imagining and representing material. I am drawn to the character of the explorer and their singular focus on frontiers in spite of risk, death, and failure -- the possibility that they could see something authentically new that could then lead to a place in history.