Southern Digital: McLean Fahnestock
Published April 17th 2025
By Joe Nolan
In his new series, longtime Number art critic, Joe Nolan curates a dialog with digital artists from across the region. Nolan and a wide-ranging group of digital creators talk process, projections, pixels and the meaning of place in the liminal expanses of digital art.
McLean Fahnestock is an artist and educator based in the Nashville suburb of Old Hickory, Tennessee. We explore the relationship between sculpture and video art, accuse Big Art of stealing Miami from the South, and attempt to locate immaterial work displayed in the no-dimensional space on the other side of our screens.
Joe Nolan caught-up with the artist before her recent residency at Cerritos College in suburban Los Angeles. The residency culminated in Fahnestock’s solo exhibition, Backup Utopia.
Here There Will be Water, 360 VR film, stereo sound, 2022, still
Joe Nolan: You grew up in Virginia. How did you end up in Nashville?
McLean Fahnestock: I ended up in Nashville in high school. We moved down here ‘91, ‘92 from Northern Virginia to Brentwood. We got here right when the McDonald's opened in Maryland Farms – early Brentwood. So I went to Brentwood High School. I went to MTSU, and then about my junior year I left and ran around the country. And then I ended up in California. I was working for Ikea and I wanted to get into design with them. So I came back, finished, and then went back to California where I got my MFA at California State University, Long Beach. Once I got out of school, I worked for six years for Bill Viola, who's a well-known video artist.
J Nolan: I like his Catholic-themed videos. They remind me of being a Catholic school kid in Detroit. There’s a home-y feeling to those videos for me.
M Fahnestock: I was teaching a little bit, doing some work in academia, and at that point I was married to my current husband. We were looking at moving back to the South because he's from Houston. I contacted people I knew across the South and I got a call back from Barry Jones. At that time he was chair of the art department at Austin Peay. I knew Barry because he had curated my work into an exhibition of video art at there. He said “We need somebody to be a visiting professor.” So Lucas and I moved here with the idea of “Oh, it'll just be a year.” That was in 2014.
J Nolan: And now you're the head of the art department?
M Fahnestock: Yeah, I'm chair of the department.
J Nolan: You really took over.
M Fahnestock: I sure did. But, I still keep a presence in L.A. I'm really happy that I can still have strong connections to Los Angeles.
Here There Will be Water, 360 VR film, stereo sound, 2022, still
J Nolan: You’re a digital artist based in the South, but that label doesn't totally capture your story as an artist. You’re like most artists who came to digital after working in more traditional mediums.
M Fahnestock: I came to working digitally, and working with video specifically, through my roommate in graduate school. I'd always been really good with computers. I was introduced to computers at a very young age – in the early 80s with a TRS-80 Model III, back when computers were one solid unit. I was introduced by my grandfather who was self taught, but very into computers. My parents even enrolled me in tutoring for computer art when I was in elementary school. But I really hadn't made a connection to what I was doing in my practice until I was in grad school.
J Nolan: What were doing before grad school?
M Fahnestock: My degrees are in sculpture, and I still work in sculpture quite a bit, but I've been using a lot more digital fabrication. I really approached video from the sculptural side because I didn't come at it from photography. I wasn't coming at it from lens-based capture. I didn't really even start shooting my own footage until a couple of years ago. I wasn’t interested in that. I was interested in video as a way of capturing movement that I couldn't get my sculptures to do in the way I wanted them to. And then capturing tension in a way I couldn't get my sculptures to do. And I was interested in that as a material to ask questions about sculpting time.
Here There Will be Water, 360 VR film, stereo sound, 2022, still
J Nolan: I was interested in digital art before I found my way in. I had a similar revelation when I realized I could take the implied energy and movement of an acrylic abstract painting and make it actually move using scanning and animation tools. It was a natural evolution that extended the work into a new space.
M Fahnestock: When I started doing videos it was because my roommate Desiree, in grad school, said “Take a class that you can do and would be fun.” She was working in photography and in video and was coming at it from that point of view – setting things up and performing it for the camera and capturing. And video has that really strong performance-based background. When you look at the history of video, it really teams-up with performance, especially feminist performance. So, Desiree was coming at it from that point of view, and I was just good with computers. I needed to do something fun because I was really bogged down in my work, and my work wasn't doing what I wanted. I took this video class for fun, and it really kind of opened up the way I was seeing the possibilities in my work. I realized I could have something that's physical and sculptural, but it can still home-in on motion and emotion. I started out working with footage from television news and interviews – places where I could see political tension and staged tension in television interviews. Growing up outside of D. C., that was something I had been exposed to for my whole life. I've continued on from there working with found footage, and now I’m working more with footage that I capture myself. And I’m combining it with photographic and sculptural elements as I've shifted my focus from the medium of television to the landscape, and exploring the landscape and the desire for place.
J Nolan: Southern art has traditionally always been spoken about in terms of “regionalism” – the idea of place is intrinsic to that discussion. I feel like the art establishment defaulted to that label for the longest time in a diminishing way while the adults on the coasts were having grown-up talk.
M Fahnestock: As a Southern artist, there are things that you're expected to have included in your work. Are you addressing poverty? Are you addressing kudzu? There are things that are expected of Southern artists. And we see that in the selection of Southern work in other areas.
J Nolan: I’m reminded of the BIPOC and women artists I’ve interviewed over a few decades who’ve talked about trying to make their personal, uniquely individual art under pressure to make someone else’s idea of “black art” or “women’s art” etc. This kind of pressure can come from collectors or curators or from peers. More generally, I’ve seen Southern artists of all kinds challenged to match – or not – other’s preconceived ideas of what a “Southern artist” is supposed to be or do.
4. Own Your Own Future, Small closed image set generative AI project, detail, 2021
M Fahnestock: Stephanie Syjuco is a Filipino artist who talks about how a choice that you make as an artist is if you are going to address your identity or not. And as artists we have to decide how we're going to define our work and how we're going to define the way that we address the expectations of other people in our work as well. Because that is something that is going to be put upon us by the market or by curators or by an audience.
J Nolan: Southerners seem more interested in history and regional identity than the Midwesterners I grew up with in Detroit and Southern Michigan. It sometimes feels like Southern artists are held to expectations that include both unfair stereotypes as well as ideological projections.
M Fahnestock: And if you are looking for funding in the South, that becomes a very tricky thing.
J Nolan: All of this is swirling around this idea that Southern art is about a place, right? But, as Southern artists, what place are we in when we’re making work in the no-place of the digital? Is this still Southern art?
M Fahnestock: I think it's really interesting to consider because I make work that exists in a lot of different forms. It exists tied to an object, being part of a sculpture, or as being a light projection which can go anywhere, or as something that is augmented reality, so you have to enter through a portal to see it. Because it isn't an object that is defined, the fact that it doesn't have that tether, allows it to discuss how we tether, right? There's a great freedom in not being tethered, but then you need to give enough context for people to approach a work that doesn't have a tether. What's a signifier where somebody can go, “OK, I know where that lives. That lives in this context?” We don't see so much digital work because digital work is still problematic when it comes to installation and exhibition. And because of the idea of “Where does this work belong after I see it?”
J Nolan: Many artists and curators like to play with audience expectations. Some artists might even want to upset those expectations more abruptly. And sometimes it's incredibly effective, and other times, not so much. It's a really tricky thing to do. It's tricky to do something new and at the same time keep it familiar.
5. Own Your Own Future, Small closed image set generative AI project, installation proposal, 2021
M Fahnestock: That's the thing with digital work: in order to make it digestible there needs to sometimes be a clearer context. That's why I think those immersive Van Gogh exhibits have worked so well. Because when people approach video art, when people approach a large projection, they're sometimes there without context – “What am I supposed to do in this room? How am I supposed to digest a video? It's not a movie?”
J Nolan: It’s on a loop and there’s not a seated audience, and there's no credits.
M Fahnestock: Is there a narrative? It's a lot harder to a person who doesn't have a lot of experience with it. If they already know the content – it's Vincent van Gogh's paintings – then just the “experience” part is new. That's why understanding those kinds of parameters that we're setting as digital artists can help us bridge some of these gaps with audiences. I imagine settings where audiences are experiencing it more, and then they're more open to walking in and deciding, “I'm gonna sit through some of this. I'm gonna see what happens.” Every time there’s a way that we can break down a wall to the experience of a digital work it's a good thing.
J Nolan: Flip back to the context idea. We were talking about the poverty, the kudzu, all these themes and tropes. As a native Southerner, do you see your own work in a Southern context?
M Fahnestock: It's not that I've avoided putting my work in a Southern context. I haven't utilized things that I see as being, in my mind, explicitly Southern – or even implicitly. I've made a couple of works that are sited in Tennessee that have footage from Tennessee. I think I’ve drawn from my experience of moving through the landscape here, and the contrast between living here – and especially living in Old Hickory – and thinking about how Nashville is sold as a place of escape.
J Nolan: I feel like Old Hickory is still an under-the-radar neighborhood in Nashville. You’ve got an affordable studio that’s walkable from your house – that’s almost unheard of here, nowadays. You need a space that you can set up and leave to do your stop-motion stuff. You need room to build stuff in.
6. There Between Here and Here, Multichannel video installation with sound, Documentation of installation at West Virginia University Mesaros Gallery, 2021
M Fahnestock: Right now i'm getting ready to pack up for this residency – it ends with an exhibit. I've got a studio wall full of prints. I've got two sculptures that are done. I've got one sculpture that's in pieces. I've got a bunch of other ones that I'm gonna try to get ready. I’ve got a copy stand and a scanner and all this stuff everywhere. People are like, “Oh, digital work. You don't need space. It's on a computer.”
J Nolan: My digital paintings all start as acrylics on panel. So I still get my hands dirty doing digital art. I still have to clean my brushes after making these GIFs, y’all.
M Fahnestock: I have a problem of collecting old technology. I love CRTs – cathode ray tube televisions. So when I see those available, I grab them.
J Nolan: If I see one, I'll tell you.
M Fahnestock: I had a huge collection of them that I donated before I left Los Angeles, because it was going to be a whole U-Haul full of them. I’ve been kind of grabbing those again. I’ve been grabbing old VHS and DVD recorders – the cameras. The old camcorders that'll do Hi8 or Super 8 tapes. I’ve been grabbing those because some of them have night mode, all these crazy things.
J Nolan: There's a Jim Jarmusch movie called Year of the Horse. It's a Neil Young concert film mostly shot on Super 8.
M Fahnestock: I grab those at swap meets and flea markets, and then you have to order parts and whatever, but they're great and I love them.
J Nolan: Have you used those in your work?
M Fahnestock: I'm shooting things and playing around with them. We’ll see how it goes. The look is so nice. I've shot things in 4K, and in 8K, and I've got these 3D, 360 cameras and these really cool things to use for VR, but I also love preservation of that older technology, and the look of the older technology. I think there's something to be said for that aesthetic and the content that brings. I think that there's this kind of perception that digital work is, “Oh, you just have your phone and your laptop and you're good to go.” I feel like it takes up a lot more space every time I turn around. But, that's how I get texture, and that's how I get some of the feeling that's right for stuff. It’s knowing where to get the footage and how to. I talk about it as being my sculpture sensibility: knowing what material works with what, and how to get the right kind of like feeling and attachment for what I'm trying to say with the work.
J Nolan: I agree with you about using real materials to achieve texture and presence in digital projects. When I realized I could use animating tools to abring the movement and texture in a painting to life, it gave me a reason to take that work to the other side of the screen. I always need a reason for a tool or a reason for a material.
7. There Between Here and Here, Multichannel video installation with sound, Documentation of installation at West Virginia University Mesaros Gallery, detail, 2021
M Fahnestock: Needing the reason is good. Being aware, being cognizant of the decision making process just makes it a richer work. Instead of just, “I did it.” When I was working in digital collage more, when I was really doing a lot of cutout stuff, I wondered “Why is this a digital collage versus a hand-cut collage?Why am I making the decision to not sit here with a X-Acto knife? Why is it that this needs to be done in this way, and why am I making this decision?” Sometimes it’s because the finesse of the digital tool allowed me to do things that are physically impossible with the knife. But it was also because when I was doing things digitally I was actually creating a meld instead of collage where I'm working with layering and overlay. It was about things kind of slipping beneath the surface. Things were actually combining into each other in a way that you would do with watercolor. That's what I was able to do with digital collage that I could not physically do with paper. So really thinking through, “Why is this being done digitally?” I think it's an important thing about working digitally.
J Nolan: Your Backup Utopia project has such a great title. I sounds like an anarchist book I would’ve read in the ‘90s.
M Fahnestock: It’s kind of like an anarchist book. I began working on this project thinking about our being sold an idea of paradise. But what do we have as our backup? What's our backup plan? Because we are kind of in a backup plan situation. So, what's our backup plan? So these works are the construction of our backup plan for an idealized kind of nature and idealized world. What does AI think about the replacement of nature that we see in digital simulation through AI and through coding? This looks like an ideal representation and then you look closer and see that the birds are code and the flowers are repeated. And so things start to kind of fall apart the more we start to look at it. That's currently my experience with AI. Things fall apart the more that you look at it. It’s the same with the selling of suburban life or landscape.
J Nolan: AI already has its own mythology, and it's an ascendancy story of this inevitable thing. And it's weird, because it often can't do the basic research I might ask it for. The AI blurbs on Google searches are wrong all the time. I also think it’s hilarious that the visual rendering struggles with fingers and hands, because every person who’s ever drawn has struggled with fingers and hands. One part of me is totally aligned with the idea that everything everybody says is going to happen and I have to position myself and my creative work in various ways to optimize for this AI-tomorrow. Then there's another part of me that thinks it’s all just bullshit. I feel like your work is saying this new world is already here, but it might be just the next abandoned mall in no time.
8. As Far As - a view, sewn tapestries, 2021
M Fahnestock: This work is this kind of mix of anonymous landscape. Here's this landscape that I bought at Dollar Tree. Where did this landscape come from? I’m able to trace some of these images on the internet and so I can find out this waterfall is in Croatia. It's being sold to me as this idealization of a waterfall in a landscape. Here's my experience of something, and here's the thing that is sold to me. How are these things congruent and incongruent? And how can I represent that digitally? I'm doing a large scale projection. So a projection that spreads across several walls that’s interspersed with screens. Then there's a series of prints with AR components. So you have the print and then you hold up your phone with the Artivive app and there's 3D elements. I've also got some inflatable sculptures. I’ve been doing assemblage with inflatables, which has been a lot of fun. They've got a window gallery at this center, and that's where they're going to be in this kind of window. I’m using things you buy for parties to kind of make an oasis. I'm constructing an oasis, but it's a wrong oasis. So the inflatable palm trees are chopped down and flopped over and on fire.
J Nolan: Palm trees are very Southern. Every time we drive to the gulf my wife and I have a tradition of competing to see who can spot the first palm tree. The South used to be viewed unfavorably by the Art Industrial Complex, but did everybody forget that Miami is in the South?
M Fahnestock : It was the place where the New Yorkers had their second homes, right? So they claimed it for themselves. When I was in grad school, there were four of us from the South in California together. And we used to talk about what made us stand apart as Southerners or having Southern sensibilities. We all had a different sense of time. We all were a little different – a bit extra, maybe? There was a kind of maximalism that came across in our work. We would talk amongst ourselves about our experiences of different communal environments like church and Meemaw's house. There's a visual vernacular that we have that is different, and that we were playing-on as Southern people working in California. There's something you just pick up.
J Nolan: You have a practice that’s connected to both LA and Nashville, and you’re a sculptor working in digital and video. Does it sometimes feel like moving between two different worlds?
M Fahnestock: I do live in this in-between with digital work where there is this materiality that comes from sculptural practice, but there is a desire for it to move or for there to be this tension or this narrative. With the newer works that I'm showing there are these bird sculptures that have monitors for heads. The AR works have this digital thing embedded in them. It's that tension of reveal/conceal with these works that blend physical sculpture with digital.
J Nolan: You’re driving to Los Angeles?
M Fahnestock: I'm driving. I'm taking a bunch of stuff with me. I'm driving because I'm going to be there for a month and I have to have a car in Southern California.
J Nolan: Do you just get on 40 and go?
M Fahnestock: You just get on 40 and go.