Carter Burden Gallery presents The Phantom Forest in the east gallery featuring Allen Hansen and Elizabeth Jordan. 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.

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.

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.