portfolio.
about.
Artist Statement
I create because it is the only way I can pause my mind. There's a constant whirling chaos of thoughts going through my head, at a speed so rapid my attempts to articulate them are usually in vain. Needless to say, this makes verbal expression quite infuriating, even writing this is giving me a headache. However, when I paint, I let abstraction and expression do the talking. I place my brush on the canvas, and whatever is in my head flows down my arm into my fingers and onto the page. I can capture each thought as it passes because a painting does not need to be finished in the way a sentence does. It does not require structure. It can flow between ten different images and somehow still create coherence. And when my hand has grown tired, because my brain never will, I can sit back and observe, finally, having paused a moment in my mind.
Artist Bio
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Chloe Carlson is a 22 year old artist who pays homage to her city in describing herself as “just another Kalamazoo creative.” Carlson is a multi medium artist working primarily with paint and ink to create large scale paintings aimed at capturing her cognitive experience of the world. Leaning into her background in philosophy, she explores ideas of existentialism, critical social theory, and emotion, through aspects of abstraction, surrealism, and expressionism. In her own words, “my work questions how one can transfer the metaphysical into a material visualization.” The 2024 exhibition of her senior dissertation Everything Passes was the first public showcase of her work, in which she displayed five paintings centered around her journey with death anxiety. Carlson’s newest pieces represent a milestone in her practice, as she transitions into an era of experimentation–working for the first time with wooden surfaces and oil paints to explore mental conceptions of the physical body.
