2020 Faculty Biennial Profile: Regan Golden-McNerney

Meet the artists of the 2020 MCAD Faculty Biennial

My practice as an artist and writer is to examine the hold that specific places have.

For the past decade, my work has focused on two sites: a forest in Massachusetts behind my grandmother’s house at the edge of a subdivision and a ragged prairie in Minnesota bordering my neighborhood at the center of the city. Both landscapes are edgelands, wild thin strips of forest or prairie that conceal from view adjacent developments. I am subsumed within these liminal landscapes, enveloped in the colors and quality of light, their history and cultural significance until I become attuned to small changes in these vanishing, green spaces.

My photographs, drawings, and collages both record the site overtime and relay how I experience and imagine the place. The desire to present in each image both an objective document of a disappearing landscape and a subjective experience of this place has led to my innovative process: I use high resolution scans and a macro lens to depict the plants that thrive in these edgelands in precise detail, only to obscure these exacting pictures with heavy brushstrokes and fragments of cut paper. I conflate painting and photography in my practice.

About Regan Golden-McNerney

Regan Golden-McNerney depicts ecological change in the American landscape using drawing materials and altered photographs. Golden-McNerney's images and cut-paper installations have been exhibited in solo and group shows both nationally and internationally, including Harvard University's Fisher Forestry Museum, the Cue Foundation in New York City, the Soo Visual Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Midwest Photographers Project at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago.

Golden-McNerney has received numerous grants and fellowships including the Core Program Fellowship in Critical Studies at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Jerome Foundation Emerging Artist Fellowship, Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant, and a Long-term Ecological Research Grant in the Arts from the National Science Foundation. In 2017, Golden-McNerney was an Artist-in-Residence at the College of Biological Sciences Conservatory at the University of Minnesota, a home for rare and endangered plants from around the world.

Golden-McNerney is also a writer who focuses on how landscapes are seen and experienced, including the recent publication through the Walker Art Center Magazine, Seeing Plants: Vision and Botany in Contemporary Art. Golden-McNerney is currently Adjunct Faculty at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.