33.3 F
Clarksville
Tuesday, March 19, 2024
HomeEventsAPSU Art and Design assistant professor McLean Fahnestock presents new work at...

APSU Art and Design assistant professor McLean Fahnestock presents new work at Nashville’s Frist Center for Visual Arts

Austin Peay State University - APSUClarksville, TN – Austin Peay State University assistant professor of art and design McLean Fahnestock will present new work at the Frist Center for Visual Arts in Nashville Tennessee. Her experimental work will join others as a part of an exhibition, titled “Pattern Recognition: Art and Music Videos in Middle Tennessee.”

The exhibition will be on view from April 29th-October 8th in the Conte Community Arts Gallery, and is free to the public.

Frist Center for Visual Arts
Frist Center for Visual Arts

Bringing together experimental videos and digital photographs by four artists working in the Middle Tennessee region, “Pattern Recognition” explores the expressive potential of digital media.

In animated landscapes, geometrical compositions and other invented scenarios, the videos show natural and computer-generated patterns that weave, ripple and flow in alluring ways.

In their experimental works, Fahnestock, along with artists Morgan Higby-Flowers, Joon Sung and John Warren, manipulate viewers’ sense of time and space and resist traditional notions of linear storytelling. Each artist employs slow pacing, fluid transitions between recognizable and abstract imagery and sound to induce feelings of reverie, pleasure and mystery.

“The title ‘Pattern Recognition’ alludes to a computer science term for the identification and organization of patterns, combining data from across the information spectrum,” says Frist Center Chief Curator Mark Scala. “While in technology, the goal is to gain hard knowledge of the complex behavior of linked systems, artists in this exhibition combine and manipulate information into irrational patterns that bring to mind themes of memory, mystery and disturbance.”

Fahnestock finds personal resonance in the symbolism of the ocean, its rhythms and continuity, its role in family history and its powerful hold on the collective imagination. Her “Reclamation” series was inspired by the family lore surrounding her grandfather, a sea captain who collected natural specimens and cultural artifacts for the American Museum of Natural History.

His ship sank off the coast of Australia in 1940, inspiring Fahnestock more than 60 years later to research his life and the circumstances of the shipwreck. Becoming fascinated with the poetry and allure of the ocean, she began a series of videos and photographs in which its wave patterns are photoshopped onto the silhouettes of sinking ships, distorting the image of a solid ship into a marker of transition—a mirror in space and a hole in time—rather than a form being reclaimed by the sea it was meant to defy.

For more information, please contact Buddy Kite at 615.744.3351 and bkite@fristcenter.org or Ellen Jones Pryor at 615.243.1311 and epryor@fristcenter.org

RELATED ARTICLES

Latest Articles