NEW YORK, NY.- Carter Burden Gallery presents three new exhibitions: The Phantom Forest in the east gallery featuring Allen Hansen and Elizabeth Jordan, Interior s in the west gallery featuring Jackie Shatz, and On the Wall featuring Bette Klegon Halby. The exhibition runs from February 2nd through 23rd at 548 West 28th Street in New York City.

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.”

Allen Hansen, born in the 1950’s in a suburb of Los Angeles, is a painter. His parents were dedicated, amateur painters. Hansen earned a BFA from University of California, Irvine. While there, he studied with Craig Kauffman whose attention to materiality greatly influenced him. Kauffman often used the sensuous physical properties of materials as an emphasis for his sculptures and paintings. Hansen’s work has been shown in numerous solo and group shows across the country, including at the Hampden Gallery at UMASS Amherst, the Sideshow Gallery, 5th Annual Governors Island Art Fair, and the Whitney Museum of American Art at Equitable Center in New York City. His is included in the collections of the Reader’s Digest, Ronald Lauder, Barbara Schwartz, Peter Klein, Edward Thorpe, Kimille Taylor, and Ann Partlow.

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.

Elizabeth Jordan is an artist working primarily in sculpture. She was born in New Jersey and has lived in Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Florida and New York. She attended Douglass College at Rutgers University, and earned a Master’s Degree in Fine Art from the University of South Florida. She also attended the Tamarind School of Lithography and is a Master Printer. The artist currently resides and has a studio in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. In early 2016, she participated in an exhibition at the Old School Museum of Art in Delray Beach, where her on-going work titled The Lives of Birds was installed. Selected exhibitions include: Current curated by Benjamin Sutton at Gowanus Loft in Brooklyn in 2014, Thaw curated by Jill Conner at Dorsky Gallery in Long Island City in 2014, A Book About Death: A tribute to Ray Johnson and Emily Harvey at the Queens Museum in 2009, and The Return of the Cadaver Exquis at The Drawing Center in New York in 1989.

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.

Jackie Shatz is a sculptor, painter, teacher and lecturer. She attended Bennington College and earned a BFA in painting (magna cum laude) and an MFA in sculpture, both from Hunter College. Shatz's work has been displayed in numerous solo and group shows, including exhibitions at the June Kelly, Monique Knowlton, and Kouros galleries in New York City. She has also curated and organized countless exhibitions, including “CollageLogic,” which was last presented in 2012 at Hampden Gallery at UMass in Amherst. Shatz is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Fellowship, a Craft Alliance New Techniques grant and several NYFA SOS grants. She has been artist-in-residence at the Kohler Arts/Industry program, where she created a series of music box sculptures and has collaborated on sound and sculptural installations for Glyndor Gallery at Wave Hill and on Governors Island. She has taught and lectured at many places, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Her work has been reviewed by The New York Times, The New York Daily News, and The Village Voice, among others.

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”.

Bette Klegon Halby is a New York based abstract painter/sculptor. She earned a BS in Architecture and Design, and a BA in Education from the University of Michigan, studied at the University of California, Berkeley and California College of Art in Oakland and earned an MFA from Wayne State University. She has taught Art at The University of Michigan, Wayne State University and the Detroit Art Institute. Klegon Halby has exhibited in numerous group shows and solo shows throughout the country. Among them are the Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery in New York in 2009-2015, the Rubin Museum of Art in New York in 2015, the NY Armory Show in 2013 and 2014, the Alexandria Museum 2012, the Detroit Art Institute 1962. Her works are included in numerous corporate and private collections. Klegon Halby currently serves on the Dean's Advisory Board, University of Michigan's Stamps School of Art and Design.