Courtney McClellan Takes You Inside an Evangelical College’s Supreme Court Simulation

When the United States was founded 250 years ago, it was all but for the purpose of protecting religious freedom—or, more candidly, protecting sects of Christianity frowned upon across the pond. The very first amendment established the separation of church and state, and this was about more than simple tolerance, with the founders feeling that government corrupted religion and vice versa. Now, that separation is under threat as in no other time in history.

Courtney McClellan’s latest show manages to evoke this present condition—and all the fury it inspires—using deadpan photographs of empty rooms. Specifically, she made photographs of mock courtrooms at universities across the American South, among them a haunting simulation of the Supreme Court’s chambers on the campus of Liberty University, an evangelical Southern Baptist college in Virginia. There, apparently, future lawyers are trained to try and run the country in the name of Jesus Christ.

My blood boils at the mere sight of Liberty’s red velvet curtains with gold tassels, its marble columns and black leather chairs. The university’s vision of justice leaves me ill at ease: it’s the kind of place where watching pornography on campus WiFi could get you expelled, and also the kind of place whose egregious mishandling of sexual assault cases received the most serious penalty ($14 million) in the Education Department’s entire history. The school was caught punishing victims for violating their honor code, which prohibits premarital sex, while failing to punish assailants.

Those details aren’t stated in McClellan’s show “Simulations” at Shirley Fiterman Art Center in Lower Manhattan. They’re in the baggage I bring to it having grown up in Liberty’s orbit, where rules laid out in the name of religion wind up instead fortifying the power of mortal men. McClellan’s photographs invite us to think about these powerful men and their formative years. My mind drifts to Brett Kavanaugh as a student; my stomach churns.

McClellan’s lens reveals her mock courtrooms as bizarre theater-courtroom-classroom amalgamations, drawing our attention to their inherent theatricality—stages, spotlights, curtains, seating. For most visitors, courtrooms are familiar primarily through images from the news or TV, and indeed, theatricality is crucial to their authority: The curator’s essay notes a 2013 Reader’s Digest poll showing Judge Judy outranking all nine Supreme Court Justices in public trust, underscoring the power of performance.

Shown together, architectural patterns begin to emerge. We see dated spins on Neoclassicism with lots of columns and carpets, drop ceilings and stained seats, as well as class-coded materials: marble surfaces and crystal chandeliers in some, chipped wood veneer in others. Yet at the crux of this simulation is something frighteningly real, a glimpse at how the sausage fest gets made.

McClellan frames her images, taken over the course of six years, in an installation in which baby blue borders meet blue walls and blue wainscotting. Architecture and image, in other words, blur into one another, pointedly so. These rooms are, like the photographs, a simulated image of authority. The viewer, meanwhile, is placed in the position of judge and jury, listener and lawyer, with images shot from behind the podium and the back of the audience, too. The harsh abrasive fluorescent lights in these courtrooms are enough to make anyone feel on trial. McClellan’s lens often locks eyes with the courtroom’s, showing one security camera set starkly against a curtain and staring you down, and another concealed cleverly among crown molding like a fly on the wall.

Raised by a lawyer and a teacher in North Carolina and now living in Atlanta, where she is both an artist and the editor of the regional arts magazine Burnaway, McClellan is careful not to present the South as a monolith. Her sequence does reveal umpteen painted portraits of white men looming over courtroom after courtroom. But eventually, near the end, a more diverse crowd appears in images taken at the North Carolina Central School of Law, one of the region’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities. I know little of that or other of the various schools’ politics, but I do know that where there are reactionaries, there is resistance.

“Simulations” one of few shows in the city to actually confront the frightening demise of democracy unfurling as we speak, and I admire that McClellan does so gently and assertively at the same time. The work avoids merely telling you what you already know, preaching to the choir, and striking a tone that forecloses speaking across the aisle. The images speak for themselves, and they speak loudly. Here “simulations” and “conservatism” emerge as synonyms, emulating and repeating what came before while also hollowing it out.