Included in Local Stories: 2022, Atlanta Art Week (Copy)
The Advancement of Learning
Public Art Project
4K video 1:35
2022
I am often drawn to institutional spaces and visual archives in order to consider how architecture indicates power. My response to A&E Local Stories began when I found archival photographs and a hand-drawn blueprint of the Carnegie Library in the digital collection at the Library of Congress. I was immediately curious about the blueprint because it reminded me of the board game Clue. In contrast, the 1930s archival photographs of the building’s columns were stately and imposing. To tell the story of a structure that was built, torn down and then rebuilt, I knew I needed to depict transformation but through a contemporary lens. I documented the blueprint like a mechanical eye scanning over an image, or a video game player moving through a virtual space. I repeated and layered the photographs of the columns on top of the moving blueprint. The columns then fall away, seeming to tumble over the edge into the real columned sculptures beneath the Breen Smith billboard. Finally, all that is left are the words taken from the old Carnegie Library facade: “Dedicated to the Advancement of Learning.”
Witness Lab (Community High School) (Copy)
2020
Installation and Performance
25’x30’x9’
Courtney McClellan, Witness Lab, 2020, mixed media. © Courtney McClellan. Courtesy the artist. Photography: Christopher Ankney
From the Exhibition: An installation, performance site, and workspace, Witness Lab is a museum-based courtroom created by Roman J. Witt Artist in Residence Courtney McClellan. This space serves as a venue for mock trials, staged readings, and other performances. Through creative interventions, Witness Lab seeks to understand the emotional acceptance of eyewitness testimony as fact—even though evidence shows that shared experiences are teaming with multiple, diverse, and sometimes contradictory perspectives. At its core, the installation is a performance project that unfolds over time, offering the public a complex truth: the relationship between performance and law is itself a living, evolving, interpretive act.
Audiences are invited to attend performances and mock trials. Passersby can also observe the activity through the glass walls of the gallery. Taking the role of courtroom sketch artists, or court reporters, students from the U-M Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design will document the events of the space through drawing, text, photography, and video—honing their observational skills by creating artistic records of the procedures.
Witness Lab (Shakespeare’s Courtroom scenes, Gillian Eaton’s class) (Copy)
2020
Installation and Performance
25’x30’x9’
Witness Lab (install) (Copy)
2019
installation
25’x32’
Witness Lab (University of Michigan Museum of Art install) (Copy)
2020
Installation and Performance
25’x30’x9’
Clue (overhead view) (Copy)
2019
360 degree digital image (Matterport)
A 360 degree image taken with University of Michigan Mock Trial students performing their respective roles.
Legal Simulation and Non-linear Time (Double Jeopardy GIF) (Copy)
2019
GIF still
7 sec
A performative lecture about time in Midlands, the fictional state in which all Mock Trial Cases are set. Three illustrative GIFs included.
https://burnaway.org/magazine/legal-simulation-and-non-linear-time/
Speculative Annotation (screen shot), Maya Lin Vietnam Veteran Memorial Sketch
2021
Public Art, Web-based Application
Speculative Annotation is an open-source dynamic web application and public art project intended for students and teachers. It was created during McClellan’s tenure as the 2021 the Innovator in Residence for the Library of Congress.
Speculative Annotation (screen shot), Ars memorandi per figuras Evangelistarum, Annotated by Curator Stephanie Stillo
2021
Public Art, Web-based Application
Speculative Annotation is an open-source dynamic web application and public art project intended for students and teachers. It was created during McClellan’s tenure as the 2021 the Innovator in Residence for the Library of Congress.
Patsy T. Mink papers, Annotation by Curator Elizabeth A. Novara
2021
Public Art, Web-based Application
Speculative Annotation is an open-source dynamic web application and public art project intended for students and teachers. It was created during McClellan’s tenure as the 2021 the Innovator in Residence for the Library of Congress.
Simulations (Liberty University, Supreme Court Replica) (Copy)
Digital print
32x40
2022
Simulations is a photo installation that includes images of practice courtrooms at law schools across the American South. The series depicts spaces that simultaneously function as courtroom, classroom, and theater. These sites occasionally host the actual adjudication of law, for example a state appellate case, and thus blur the boundaries between real and staged experience. The images address this interwoven architecture of training, performance, and power.
The first exhibition of this work was at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia as part of the Working Artist Project Fellowship: https://mocaga.org/calendar/courtneymclellan/
Simulations (University of North Carolina School of Law) (Copy)
2020
Digital print
12’’x16’’
Simulations (University of Alabama School of Law) (Copy)
2020
Digital Print
18’’x24’’
Simulations (Lincoln Memorial University- Duncan School of Law) (Copy)
2022
Digital Print
18’’x22’’
North Carolina Central School of Law (Copy)
2020
Digital Print
18’’x24’’
Midlands: Setting (Copy)
2018
Video still
7:34
Midlands: Setting begins with a closely framed image of a judge’s bench. The camera pulls back, revealing the chair is in a grand, well-lit space. The panning camera raises further, revealing itself to be a drone moving through a two-story space, recording the red velvet chairs. From this aerial viewpoint, one can see vaulted ceilings, and wooden seats within a courtroom. Hovering over the witness chair, the drone looks back the familiar but empty courthouse.
Midlands: Character (Copy)
2018
Video still
7:34
Midlands: Character begins with a close up shot of a Google doc with the words “Midlands Courthouse” typed in simple font. The camera pans back to reveal the setting is a Google doc, with scrolling legal screenplay. “Prosecutor” and “Defense Attorney” characters actively comment on the Google doc, offering their internal thoughts about the movements and gestures of the courtroom drama described.
Midlands: Prop (Copy)
2018
Video still
7:34
Midlands: Prop opens on a computer program with the blinking text “Begin to scan”. A green then blue digital material grows in the central frame. As the camera pans the blue material develops, a men’s blazer is formed. When the scan is complete, the blazer disappears and then returns as a shiny yellow coat.
Midlands (installation view at SculptureCenter, New York, 2018) (Copy)
2018
Video installation
7:34
https://www.sculpture-center.org/exhibitions/3430/in-practice-another-echo