Courtney Mackedanz

The artist, a white person, with blue eyes, and long blonde hair, reclines with their back against a mirror. They are wearing a black shirt, and a gold nose ring and earrings. The mirror behind them reflects their double in a green aura, also reflecting the sun's brilliance, a large plant growing, as well as factory windows, diffused in the background. The artist looks, almost smiling, directly into the camera.

Performances:

A composite of four images representative of the artists recent work are arranged in a quadrant. Overall, the frame is filled with black, greyscale, earthtones, and greens. In the upper left: An image of the artist's body draped over a metal crowd control barrier as though they are riding a horse. The gesture, set at the corner of an old stone fortress. On the upper right: the same metalic crowd control barrier is cut into small portions and held, considered both in the haptic sense of touch and through the sense of machine vision surveillance which it is seen—in a series of increasingly pixilated images. In the bottom left corner: The same machine vision surveillance simulator image is seen, greyscale pixilation specifically, though this time applied to two horses grazing in ghostly digital pasture. Finally, in the lower right: The artists hands reach into the frame holding a melting ice cast of a portion of the crowd control barrier seen in the image above. The ice melts slowly in grass illuminated by the sun as well as the warmth from the artists hands.

2025 LAB ARTIST

Courtney Mackedanz lives and works in Chicago. They were a 2024 DanceWEB Scholar with mentor Isabel Lewis (Vienna), a finalist for the 2024 Artadia Award (Chicago), and a finalist for the 2024 Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artists Program (Chicago). Recent solo exhibitions of their work include Skylab Gallery (Columbus) and Roman Susan Gallery (Chicago). Recent group exhibitions of their work include Rudimento Gallery (Quito) and ACRE Projects (Chicago). They have performed at The Arts Club, Links Hall, and High Concept Labs (Chicago) amongst others. They have attended residencies in pursuit of their research including Praxis R24 Held Experiments in Touch (Oslo), Monira Foundation Artist Residency (Chicago), and Landing 3.0 with mentor Miguel Gutierez (New York) amongst others. Mackedanz has performed in the work of Alexandra Pirici (Chicago Architecture Biennial), Otobong Nkanga (MCA Chicago), and Tino Seghal (MCA Chicago) amongst others. Mackedanz earned their BFA in Performance and Visual Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute (Chicago) and when not in the studio, they love to be with other people, plants, near the water, and with their dog (Easy), and cat (Eclipse).

Current Practice/Project: Courtney Mackedanz is an experimental dancemaker working in embodied research, expanded choreography, and multimedia performance installation. Meandering gradually through cumulative iterations, Mackedanz’s current research has been gravitating toward an exploration of the pasture as a landscape, touch as a reciprocal condition, and complexity as a context of embodiment. Mackedanz’s recent projects have explored haptic methods of experiencing the body, states of nervous system attunement, and more than human or decentralized sensing strategies to examine how negotiations of power, proximity, intimacy, and interrelation might structure, steer, constrain, or catalyze potentials in movement.

Photo credits: Courtesy of the Artist. Artist Portrait by Elaine Suzanne Miller Movement Image by Courtney Mackedanz

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