May 29 - June 24, 2025

Alchemists: Linda Casbon, Laurel Marx, Ted Thirlby, and Grace Bakst Wapner

Small Worlds: Karin Bruckner and Kate Missett

On The Wall: Kame San no Shukufuku, Blessing of the Turtle: Sue Koch

Opening Reception: Thursday, May 29, 6 - 8pm

Carter Burden Gallery presents three exhibitions: Alchemists, highlighting the distinct practices of artists Linda Casbon, Laurel Marx, Ted Thirlby, and Grace Bakst Wapner in the East Gallery; Small Worlds featuring miniature prints by Karin Bruckner and ceramic vessels by Kate Missett; and On the Wall featuring the textile installation Kame San no Shukufuku, Blessing of the Turtle exploring an unseen, underwater world by Sue Koch. The reception will be on Thursday, May 29 from 6pm to 8pm. The exhibitions run from May 29 - June 24, 2025, 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.

Download Exhibition List

Alchemists

Alchemists brings together four artists, Linda Casbon, Laurel Marx, Ted Thirlby, and Grace Bakst Wapner, who each work in different mediums but share a distinct ability to transform the humble and everyday into something quietly powerful and ethereal. Though their practices are widely varied, each artist channels a personal, spiritual alchemy, transforming raw materials into works that are refined, contemplative, and visually arresting. Geometry, whether literal or implied, runs through the show as a connective thread, grounding the ephemeral in structure and anchoring each artist's poetic sensibility.

Linda Casbon’s ceramic sculptures approach language through form, gesture, and spatial rhythm. Her works, which range from individual objects to larger groupings, operate like visual poems: metaphoric, unnameable, yet deeply familiar. Casbon explores the threshold between two and three dimensions, grounding her work in the body while reaching toward the intangible. Her pieces are vessels of presence and perception, where painted illusion and sculptural form converge in a quietly profound conversation.

Laurel Marx’s photographic works are meditations on light, balance, and reduction. Through the elimination of extraneous detail, Marx creates images that reveal a larger mystery. Lines in her compositions serve as visual thresholds, offering a quiet but decisive invitation into deeper narrative space. Her practice is rooted in attentiveness, a reverence for the way light can briefly and beautifully transform the world around us.

Ted Thirlby’s mixed media works on found plywood are acts of rescue, reflection, and reverence. Working with discarded, weathered materials, Thirlby embraces the histories embedded in their surfaces, their cracks, chips, and imperfections, and responds with gestures that seek redemption. His work questions the nature of authorship, exploring the exploring materiality and the evolving relationship between human intention and elemental force.

Closed 28 12 x 22 12 Canvas thread Paint '22 xMG_5380.JPG

Continuum 28 x 18 Paper Thread Paint '24 2.JPG

Haiku 20 x 17 Paper Burlap Silk Paint '25.jpg

Patched 40 12 x 29 12 Canvas Burlap Paint '22.JPG

Roped 25 x 19 Canvas Paint Thread 23 '24.JPG

Splitting Up 20 x 26 Paper Thread Paint '25JPG.JPG

Grace Bakst Wapner works with fabric and handmade paper to explore abstract ideas through color, texture, and form. Her process is fluid and dialogic, allowing the material to shape meaning as much as the other way around. Themes such as inheritance, transformation, and perception surface subtly through each piece, which feels both deliberate and intuitively assembled. Her works are soft yet strong, intimate yet expansive, each one its own language.

In Alchemists, each artist acts as a kind of transmuter, guiding raw substance into elevated expression. The result is a show that feels at once grounded and otherworldly, tactile and transcendent.

Small Worlds

Karin Bruckner

In Small Worlds, Karin Bruckner presents a continuous installation of 3 x 3-inch hand-pulled prints, each a unique window into a tiny universe, meticulously floated on 10 x 8-inch BFK Rives paper. This format elevates each piece, allowing for both visual intimacy and the opportunity for exploration. The works are created using a range of traditional and experimental techniques, including Chine Collé, embossing, drypoint, and mixed media. Part of Bruckner’s “125 for 125” project, the small scale offers a creative laboratory for the artist; for the viewer, a chance to collect accessible, original art. Half of the works are displayed on the gallery walls, with the remainder available in an art case. Bruckner states, “I have always been a strong believer in good things coming in small packages and of art being accessible to anyone who loves it. It’s the little things and a small world, after all.”

Karin Bruckner, born in Switzerland, holds a Master’s in Architecture from the Technical University in Munich and a Master of Science in Architecture and Building Design from Columbia University. Her transition from architecture to printmaking was sparked by the structural parallels between the two disciplines, allowing her to reconnect with her lifelong passion for art. Embracing the spontaneity and layered complexity of printmaking, Bruckner has developed a process-driven practice that pushes two-dimensional works on paper into sculptural territory. Her portfolio, which ranges from intimate pieces to large-scale spatial explorations, reflects a deep engagement with materiality, repurposing, and dimensional layering. Her work has been widely exhibited and is held in both private and public collections internationally.

Kate Missett

Kate Missett’s ceramic work in Small Worlds draws inspiration from ancient vessel forms, including Egyptian canopic jars, Native American coil pots, African terra cotta sculpture, incorporating the richly patterned surfaces of Renaissance majolica. Her subject matter has always focused on her environment; based in Brooklyn, her practice engages with social, ecological, and political themes, often sparked by photographs she takes in the city and while traveling. Missett employs a range of techniques, including raku, salt, wood firing, lusters, silkscreen, and photo transfer, to craft narrative surfaces that reflect her observations. She states, “As an artist I have frequently responded to the challenges of our times; both political and environmental.” While her work often carries a sense of whimsy, it is deeply rooted in the belief that artists have a responsibility to bear witness and respond to the world around them.

Kate Missett, b. 1951, grew up in south Florida, and attended college in New Orleans where she discovered clay in her senior year of a journalism major. Upon graduation she immediately set up her own studio and has been working in clay ever since. She moved to Brooklyn, New York in 1982 to attend Pratt Institute, where she received her MFA in ceramics. While in graduate school she worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, developing a scholarly knowledge of and fascination with ceramic cultures of the past. This interest, as well as extensive travels in Europe, the Caribbean, and India have led to the development of her current body of work. In addition to exhibiting widely, her work has been included in several publications. Missett shares her knowledge and love of ceramics as both a curator and as an instructor, giving workshops and lectures, teaching all aspects of studio ceramics as well as ceramic history at Greenwich House Pottery and City University, as well as serving as director of the Artworks program of the West Side YMCA.

“Globalization Panda”, 15” h x 9” w x 6”d, Wheel thrown and handbuilt stoneware, $575.00, web copy.jpg

Sue Koch

In her installation for On the Wall, artist Sue Koch reflects on life beneath the surface in the work Kame San no Shukufuku, Blessing of the Turtle that spans over twelve feet. In this expansive mixed media piece, which incorporates acrylic, jute, mono print, and mock silkscreen on linen, Koch depicts the sea with cephalopods, coral, jellyfish, sea anemone, urchin, and turtles through her own lexicon of abstraction. Her work is influenced by Japanese Rinpa painting particularly, Shibata Zeshin’s Autumn Grasses in Moonlight. “The Rinpa aesthetic embraces bold, exaggerated, or purely graphic renderings of natural motifs... Underlying Rinpa design sensibilities is a tendency toward simplification and abbreviation, often achieved through a process of formal exaggeration.” (John Carpenter, Designing Nature, The Rinpa Aesthetic in Japanese Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012.) Koch began working on Kame San no Shukufuku, Blessing of the Turtle in 2019 and resumed working on the piece in 2024, stating, “I didn’t feel it was finished, and perhaps, it’s still in progress, but here is where I am now.”

Artist and graphic designer, Sue Koch was raised in Connecticut where her father was a topographer, which greatly inspired her career. Koch spent over twenty-five years as the Graphic Design Manager at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET). She studied Fine Art at Skidmore College, and earned an M.A. from Columbia University, Teachers College. Her thesis, Design and Play, a Series of Projects provided the impetus for current work. Since leaving the MET in 2014, Koch has been practicing as an independent design consultant providing creative direction, strategy, graphic design, and project management, as well as being a dedicated visual artist.

Kame San no Shukufuku, Blessing of the Turtle is on view until July 30, 2025.