McLean Fahnestock seeks out footage, images, and items that expand our understanding of place and carry the character of exploration. 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 57^th Ann Arbor Film Festival.

McLean is an Associate Professor at Austin Peay University in Clarksville, TN and keeps her studio in Nashville, TN.

We build an understanding of our world through connections. Landscape and location shape our daily interactions. Those who venture to the edges of these are called adventurers, or explorers. When we encounter a new place, we build knowledge of it by comparison to our prior experiences, generating a vocabulary of discovery through similarity and difference. I begin in the institutions that tell the tales of exploration and describe distant, and not so distant, lands, and consider their roles in the shaping of places in our consciousness and contrast them with field-based, heuristic experiential modes of acquiring knowledge about place. The challenges are in understanding the separations that are present between the representations of place, the constructions of places in our mind, visual perceptions of the visitors, and the reality of the location. Faced with mutability and mediation, I examine how location is experienced across time and how it is romanticized.