Tombstone Freeway

About

The Koppel Project proudly presents TOMBSTONE FREEWAY featuring Claire Barrow

Claire Barrow's latest exhibition is a collection of new work combining installation, sculpture and works on paper. It follows on from her 2023 show 'Victim of Cosmetics', which saw large multi-media paintings and sculptures presented in an old office space, exploring the materiality and ethics of the intersection between personal self-image, the commercial beauty industry and the patterns of its deep entrenchment in our daily needs and identities. She again stares into the endless void of consumerist marketing's successful infiltration of our modern-day identities, this time focusing on the commodification of alternative subcultures and modern-day fears. 

The roots of Barrow’s new body of work dig deep into the soil of aggressive capitalism and the mythmaking advertising practices that shaped the world the millennial generation grew into. Objects, music, and culture that held profound meaning to many were crafted in the crucible of hyper-individualism, exemplified by the 2000s emo and scene subcultures. Teenage fear, anxiety, isolation and rebellion were wrapped up in Halloween branding with faux-Tim Burton flourishes. 

Tombstone Freeway, and Barrow's studio, are situated close to the edge of Camden Market, where alternative subcultural tropes have traditionally come to be commodified and integrated into London’s tourist economy. Objects liberated from this process are fragmented and reconstituted to create unnerving sculptural forms bulging with concrete, rubber, fabric and synthetic hair. Works on paper framed in found frames feel lightly cursed. 

As a special addition, the exhibition features a new commissioned film by archivist and documentarian Daisy Davidson, entitled A Visual History of Online Subculture & Cursed Images.

Claire Barrow, b. 1990, is a London-based artist originally from Yarm, Stockton-on-Tees. She studied Fashion Design at The Northern School of Art and University of Westminster, graduating in 2012 and made her London Fashion Week debut the same year as part of Fashion East. Barrow’s multifaceted practice moved naturally towards making art as her sole practice in 2018. While fascinated by the power of fashion – she continues to produce occasional collections of clothing on her own terms – under the title of Xtreme Sports, an extension of her art practice.

Her recent work explores collective and personal experience using a variety of media to create parallel pop-cultural realms, characters, and narratives that reflect the obsessions of our society. Her recent projects play with internet culture and modern consciousness, depicting fevered visions in semi-random markings, time distortions, and out-of-scale proportions. Disassembled kitsch objects are reformed into unsettling creatures, reflecting her fascination with punk commodification and horror films. Immersed in these obsessions, the viewer swims between levels of social and autobiographical narratives, recognising glimmers of their own experience in resin-dripped surfaces and broken mirrors. 

Barrow has had solo exhibitions at Fieldworks, London (Victim of Cosmetics, 2022), Dinner Party Gallery, London (Pipe 2021), Soft Opening (Pig Latin Library, 2018) and The New St Ives School (The Birth of Another Individual, 2020) as part of a six week residency. She has also participated in group shows across the UK and internationally such as: Rebel: 30 Years of British Fashion at The Design Museum, London (2023), Scraper, Most Dismal Swamp on KW Institute Digital, Berlin (2023), There's Nothing New Under The Sun, Lewisham Arthouse, London (2023), *fathers chariot/THE FALL, Council+, Berlin (2023), Liminal Bridges at Trauma Bar, Berlin (2022), Found & Lost, Zero Fold (2021), Cologne, Doing Youth at Gegenwart, Hamburg, Parasites at Projektraum im Kunstwerk, Cologne (2021), Correspondence at The Residence Gallery, London (2020), Year of the Pig at Souvenir, Berlin (2019), Real Time // Offline, SADE, Los Angeles (2019),  Run-off, Exhaust and Other Pressures, Big Medium, Texas (2017), North: Fashioning Identity, Somerset House, London (2017), Fish Wifes, Shoot The Lobster at Paramount Ranch in Los Angeles (2016) and Utopian Bodies, Liljevalchs, Stockholm (2015). 

Daisy Davidson is a documentarian, archivist, and stylist with a focus on internet imagery from the '90s to the 2010s, Japanese fashion, and alternative subcultures. Their practice involves photographing and documenting street fashion in London, particularly around Camden, and collecting found imagery from internet cultures past, which they share on their popular Instagram account, @hysteric.fashion. Davidson has released three street style zines under the title Hysteric Snaps and more recently, Hysteric Rooms, which documents the subjects in their bedrooms. These works are available at Tender Books, Heaven and Waste.