Chloe van der Vlugt (b. 2000) was born and raised in Miami, FL, and moved back after completing her bachelor’s degree at The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. She graduated with a second major in Mathematics and a minor in Dance, art forms which she continues to practice and influence her worldview and approach to visual art.
Math directly informs the interpretation of the concept of abstraction, providing a formal definition and framework, and intuition which develops through practice. In math, you can look at a particular instance of a catergory of phenomena and construct a formal definition. This involves a loss of generality. You can also go in the opposite direction, taking multiple instances of phenomena and constructing a category, loosely speaking, increasing generalization.
IIn her recent work, her obsessive fascination and affinity for the square, both as a shape and as a concept, is evident. A square is the most simple shape to tesselate, which is why pixels are squares. Squares are also highly useful in mathematics and therefore ubiquitous in the field. The shape serves her practice as a vessel for abstraction.
Dance underscores the importance embodiment, movement, and presence, which informs her view of the act of painting. The painting is residual evidence of the movement of a body, a dance leaving visual marks. The language of gesture, control, speed, scale
Film theorists who are particularly concerned with the human body influence the way Chloe conceptualizes her work, from Bergson and Merleau Ponty to more contemporary ones such as Laura Marks and Vivian Sobchack. Her work often employs gouache and acrylic painting, collage, and photography. Fragments of images come together to form memory and meaning much in the same way pixels come together to create an image.