Courtney McClellan, Witness Lab, 2020, mixed media. © Courtney McClellan. Courtesy the artist. Photography: Christopher Ankney
Note: Witness Lab closed early due to the COVID-19 pandemic, however we had a wonderful month of events. I continue to benefit from the generous and generative experience.
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, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, M.I.
February 15, 2020-May 17, 2020
https://umma.umich.edu/exhibitions/2020/witness-lab
Please check the website for simulations and events
Courtney McClellan, Witness Lab, 2020, mixed media. © Courtney McClellan. Courtesy the artist. Photography: Kathryn Beaton
Courtney McClellan, Witness Lab, 2020, mixed media. © Courtney McClellan.
Malcolm Tulip’s Directing class working on Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle
Courtney McClellan, Witness Lab, Gillian Eaton’s class, performing Shakespeare in the Courtroom, Winter’s Tale, 2020, mixed media. © Courtney McClellan.
Courtney McClellan, Witness LabChloe Root’s Community High School Mock Trial Practice , 2020, mixed media. © Courtney McClellan.
Courtney McClellan, Witness Lab, 2020, mixed media. © Courtney McClellan.
Malcolm Tulip’s Directing class working on Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle
