The site of Ryan Foerster's upcoming Miami show. (Courtesy Shoot the Lobster)

Shoot the Lobster, the new project space started in the backroom at Chelsea's Martos Gallery by Mary Grace Wright, is taking its show on the road this month. On May 13, the gallery will inaugurate Shoot the Lobster - Brighton Beach with a three person show of work by Olivier Mosset, Jeffrey Schad and Vincent Szarek.

The exhibition will be held at 425 Oceanview Avenue in the Brighton Beach area of Brooklyn. Incidentally, this is the house where the artist Ryan Foerster (who has exhibited his work at Martos Gallery) was living last summer when he held a group show in his yard of work by artists like Jacob Kassay, Zak Kitnick, Grayson Revoir, Ben Schumacher, Kyle Thurman and others.

When we ran into Jose Martos at the NADA Art Fair, he said that he wanted Shoot the Lobster to host exhibitions with different artists and curators all over, kind of like a traveling circus. In fact, on May 17, they will host a show, organized by curator Bob Nickas, of work by Ryan Foerster at a vacant lot in Miami. It's being touted as "the inaugural exhibition at Shoot the Lobster - Miami." The so-called Shoot the Lobster Headquarters, however, is still at Martos Gallery on 540 West 29th Street.

The announcement for Chris Martin's exhibition. (Courtesy Shoot the Lobster)

As far as gallery names go, it's hard to think of any as wonderfully bizarre as the one debuting in Chelsea tonight: Shoot the Lobster.

"It's from a Clash song," curator Mary Grace Wright, who's heading the project, explained. (Sure enough, the band's 1981 single "Magnificent Seven" contains these lines: "Italian mobster shoots a lobster / Seafood restaurant gets out of hand.")

Shoot the Lobster will occupy the back room of the Martos Gallery at 540 West 29th Street. "We've decided to completely transform it and just have it be a project space," Ms. Wright said. "It's going to be a whole separate entity with its own programming."

First up, tonight, is Brooklyn artist Chris Martin, who's best known as a painter and recently had a superb one-person show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, down on 26th Street. Here he's showing an installation, which is not for sale. (In the front room, Martos is opening a four-person show called "New Traditionalists.")

"He was just flipping through a National Geographic, and he found the reference material that [Martin] Kippenberger used for Return of the Dead Mother with New Problems," Ms. Wright said, referring to a 1984 painting that the German artist painted from a photograph. The original magazine page has found a place in Mr. Martin's installation.

Going forward, Ms. Wright said, Shoot the Lobster will hosts shows of both young and established artists, as well as performances and larger, curated group shows. (A show by the young painter Joshua Smith is scheduled for April 26.) Some projects may only last a night, others perhaps just two weeks—a welcome antidote to the glacial pacing of many programs at large galleries in the neighborhood, where two-month-long shows have become increasingly common.

"I think it's important because it gives us more flexibility to work with artists," Ms. Wright said, when asked about the space's model, which is somewhat unusual for Chelsea. She added that Martos has also stopped representing artists, instead working on a project-by-project basis. "It just stems from us wanting to produce what we want to produce, instead of worrying about rules."