In parallel with his exhibition After Arcadia, Ripley Whiteside invited artist McLean Fahnestock to present her work Dominion in the gallery's video room.
"Repeated bombing runs produce a unique type of destruction upon a landscape. Gold leafed munitions, promises of wealth and prosperity, burst upon the hills and coat them in developments; suburban housing tracts, parking lots, and strip malls erupt in the wake of golden plumes of smoke. After they have run out of land to lay waste to, the bombers begin to attack each other, the violence of convenience and expansion turning upon itself." - MF
McLean Fahnestock is a Nashville based interdisciplinary artist 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 an 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.