February 2 - 23, 2017

Phantom Forest: Allen Hansen and Elizabeth Jordan
Interiors: Jackie Shatz
On the Wall: Bette Klegon Halby

Carter Burden Gallery presents three new exhibitions: The Phantom Forest in the east gallery featuring Allen Hansen and Elizabeth Jordan, Interiors in the west gallery featuring Jackie Shatz, and On the Wall featuring Bette Klegon Halby. The reception will be held February 2, 2017 from 6 - 8 p.m. The exhibition runs from February 2nd through 23rd at 548 West 28th Street in New York City. The gallery hours are Tuesday - Friday, 11 a.m. - 5 p.m., Saturday 11 a.m. - 6 p.m.
 

Allen Hansen

In The Phantom Forest, Allen Hansen presents recent paintings in his first exhibition at Carter Burden Gallery. In this body of work, Hansen uses tar as his primary painting medium. The artist first used tar in his youth when he worked on weekends with his father, a roofer, under the sky with the grid of the Los Angeles suburbs below. The large dark abstract canvases overpower the viewer. Hansen's paintings deal with “the urge to the sublime,” whether in abstracted landscape or “diagramming the unknowable.” He feels that “the use of the diagram process becomes a source for abstraction and a way of unveiling invisible symmetries.”  

Elizabeth Jordan

In The Phantom Forest, Elizabeth Jordan presents recent sculptures in her first exhibition at Carter Burden Gallery. Jordan uses numerous materials to produce unique and quirky organic forms of animals in different situations. The sculptures are a visual record of the combination of obsessive processes with multiple materials, revealing the labor of working by hand and the ability of unusual materials to inspire and alter meanings. The artist makes each piece intuitively, and each has its own secrets. The sculptures are an allegory of the uncertainty and transitory nature of existence. The combination of sculptures form a larger menagerie that recognizes how ephemeral and fragile life is. This is true for both those who threaten and those who are subject to threat. As a contemplation on nature's lack of sentimentality about life or death, the sculptures remind viewers of our their mortality. Through their ambiguous subjects, complex materials and intricate detail, these works pose a series of questions for each individual to consider.

Jackie Shatz

In Interiors, Jackie Shatz presents recent wall sculptures in her first exhibition at Carter Burden Gallery. The artist builds ambiguous figurative ceramic sculptures that she then paints. Shatz treads the line between painting and sculpture, stillness and movement, and representational and abstract art. The positions of the figures are both concealing and revealing - they are caught in the act of floating, swimming, and turning away. They imply a tension between the permanence of the captured moment and the transience of movement suspended in time. The intimacy of the scale and the narrative relate to medieval and archaic art.  The artist works with themes of the psychological states such as anticipation, hesitancy, and anxiety, which emerge unplanned from the process of creating them. The meanings are hidden like the meanings in dreams.

Bette Klegon Halby

Bette Klegon Halby’s Out of the Blue -Water is Life is an eighteen-foot long installation featured at the On the Wall exhibition space. Klegon Halby uses her creative force to create impactful art with a mission. The work demonstrates Klegon Halby’s “…commitment to standing with indigenous protectors of Standing Rock until the threat to all their sacred sites has ceased forever. We all need water to live. As we all need to honor the earth and protect our waters we need to find fail proof fracking methodologies. We as Americans and citizens of the earth are entitled to healthy, clean water and to life.” This dynamic work simultaneously depicts and sculpts water in flowing canvas, shaping and molding its own unique path. Once soft, canvas is now made hard. Playing on opposites, she extends the confines of two-dimensional space by breaking boundaries, shaping the way we move and molding the way we see. Driving home her message in brilliant color, Klegon Halby reimagines the concept of clean water. For her, “color is similar to choosing a word in a poem.  It must resonate within, evoke emotion and strike a chord”.