200 Series

Claire Gilb is a practicing artist and musician currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work slips between themes of location and displacement; absence and presence; and stagnancy and motion. She is pursuing a Bachelor or Arts in Visual Studies at The New School. Claire’s senior capstone project, 200 Series, is a complex exploration in memoir and memory.

200 Series tells a story of going nowhere moving. The project attempts to locate itself in the simultaneous promise of safety and inevitable decay of a 1991 North American Volvo 240 Sedan. The project was realized over the course of four years away from her vehicle and the asphalt on which it sits in her hometown of St. Louis, Missouri. In New York, there is no such space as a car capable of interrupted cruising; no comparable isolation, and no ability to go nowhere moving. 200 Series became an exercise in time travel and reflection; an attempt at remembering such solitude. In the failure of the search for a familiar solace, the artist ultimately travelled back to her hometown to fully realize 200 Series.

The compositions are memories of intimacy, loss and time spent within the car. The personification of the car is suggested through the use of audio sampling from inside the car. Extracting audio from the Volvo and incorporating it into the work, the car is now a collaborator. The undecidedly satirical and palpably disturbing cover art echoes tinges of intimacy, automobility and the human as machine. Juxtaposing the in with the under, the images suggest the upkeep and maintenance of the Volvo and the transactional care. Influenced by her father’s desire to upkeep the car’s condition — despite its inevitable deterioration — while she’s away, the image of the artist’s body under the car is a gesture of maintenance. 200 Series is about both idling and speeding; safety and hazard, and deterioration and restoration.