Manhattan Project(s) is pleased to present new work by the multidisciplinary artist Erick Montes, a.k.a The ShortFellow. Montes’ practice is informed by his celebrated career as a dancer for the Bill T Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and as an independent choreographer and movement-based artist. Photography from various performances spanning Montes’ career provide context to the collaged stories and performative actions that populate the work.

The focal point of the show is a series of videos that were made by Montes largely while on tour with the Bill T Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company in Paris, Washington DC, Arizona, Minneapolis, and New York City.

Directly after performing with the company, that same evening, Montes would stage and film performative movement-based actions in his hotel room. This time performing for the camera, for himself, on his terms, and with his choreography. It’s about a desire to do something with the lingering energy after performing for large crowds, to do something more intimate and private, yet it becomes about being adrift and transient.

Interspersed around the videos are a series of collages made from fabric, thread, and paper, which tell personal stories, some in spanish some in english, about love and being a Mexican immigrant living in New York City. Typed with an old typewriter and sewn haphazardly onto color swatches of fabric they are fragile and worn, they are put together fast, and they are raw but unabashed.

Erick Montes joined the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company in 2003. He trained at the National School of Classical and Contemporary Dance in Mexico City, and in 2004 he was featured in Dance Magazine’s “25 To Watch”. He holds a fellowship in choreography from The New York Foundation for the Arts. He has presented his choreography in Mexico, Colombia, and Spain. In 2010 he worked in collaboration with choreographers Jennifer Nugent and Yin Mey in the creation of a Ballet for the National Dance Academy of Beijing, China.

“I’m not alone in needing to feel better about myself.  One of the easiest things to do has been to focus on my appearance, to create a glistening shell that other people are envious of.  Look cool but hollow.  So I consume, cause you can’t buy a new personality, but you can get those really exclusive sneakers and have people stop you on the street about “where’d ya cope those?”  Yes, on one level it’s a personal choice, but its also cultural, institutional.  You may not live in the best neighborhood, but you’ve got that new smartphone, that flat screen, those kicks.  You are “so fresh and so clean, clean!”  In the days and weeks after the towers fell we were not told to be introspective, but to shop.  Consumerism pushes this world view, it reduces us to stereotypes.  We need to look good, look powerful, look interesting, and it can all be bought!  This constant need to buy, buy more, the pressures are so great, so intense that the act of shopping, it’s a release.  The gods of love themselves are summoned, bloated by malaise, to bear witness to your purchase and its resulting euphoria. Sweet and satisfying… short, temporary, the pressures can’t wait to start building, again, the urges will need some new item to powder over some flaw.  The process becomes erotic, an addictive cycle where you distract yourself coveting the latest thing, letting the desires build, looking forward to that moment you can buy, you can release.”

- Chad E Marshall

Chad Marshall’s works on paper act as contemporary fables, not only because of their ties to religion and morality, but also as a result of how the work disguises the venting and social critique of the content by being entertaining and provocative. With a nod to the Br’er Rabbit stories, which the artist grew up with, the humor, sex, and general absurdity of the images is played up to counter the in your face aggression of the work’s meaning. Many of the characters in the work draw inspiration from ‘characters’ in Harlem, where the artist has lived since graduating from NYU in 2003. The look of the work, the eyeless facades, the preening grotesqueries, the background as void, work as an allegory to life experience, and are an overall statement on appropriation.

Exhibitions : 2006 Morning in America, Priska C. Juschka Fine Art, New York, NY. 2005 – New Art, New York: Reflections on the Human Condition, Trierenberg Holding AG, Traun, Austria. Kiss Me Long and Hard (group show), Priska C. Juschka Fine Art, New York, NY. 2004 -‘A Conversation,’ Marvelli Gallery, New York, Group. – Pool Art Addict, New York. Group. – 2003 – ‘Just Paint,’ Barney Bldg Commons, New York. Group. – 2001 – ‘Looks Good on Paper,’ Spruill Art Gallery, Atlanta. Group. – ‘18th Annual Print and Drawing Exhibition,’ Bradley University, Peoria. Juror: Mark Pascale, Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings Art Institute of Chicago. – 2000 – ‘2000 Delta National Print Exhibition,’ Arkansas State University, Jonesboro. Juror: Mark Pascale. – ‘Tao as Art’ Private residence, Washington, D.C. Group.. – Members Juried Exhibition #4, Art Station, Stone Mt. Juror: Anthony Hirschel Director Michael C. Carlos Museum Emory University. – - – Reviews – ‘Having an Art-to-art Talk,‘Fox, Catherine. Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 6 July 2001. – - – Awards – First prize Members Juried Exhibition, Art Station. 2000. – - – Education – MA, Studio Art with a focus in painting, New York University, 15 May 2003. – BA, Studio Art with a focus in printmaking, Morehouse College, 16 May 1999. – Visiting, Art, University of Maryland College Park, 1998.

The Report Posters #1-4, 2010, Large scale Xerox

David’s work is an investigation into the relationship between form, image, and space, and how meaning, such as a political message or a sense of empathy, gets communicated through the three. A mixed media amalgamation, the work is connected by its subtle use of formal approaches, embracing the viewer with the known while revealing a hidden agenda to the appropriation. Working in Photography, Video, Painting, Drawing, Sculpture, Sound, and installation; the tropes, or baggage, of the various mediums take on a semiotic presence, becoming a language in a contemporary story about an advancing world; a sort of contemporary hyroglyph.

The Report Posters, 2010, are large scale xerox collages created from numerous ink drawings largely sourced from NY Times editions.  The drawings focus on details from the newspaper that when taken out of context act as a collective stream of consiousness.  This subliminal history offers a form to the amorphous mass of information that pervades daily life.

David was born and raised in Southern California but has lived and worked in Brooklyn, NY for the last 10 years.  He has exhibited numerous times both nationally and Internationally during that time including Assemblage @ Artjail in NYC (2010); Other Spaces @ Center 548 in NYC (2010); No Soul For Sale @ X-Initiative in NYC (2009); Mexico City (2008). In 2007, he formed Left Coast Collective along with friends Sarah Frances Kuhn and Lane LaColla.  He currently plays drums and sings in Anita Fix and the Ecstatic Gestures.

For the project I visited every ground floor accessible business and organization along 14th Street – from high-end boutiques to pizza places, from barber shops to a church – asking the owners and employees to share their observations of 14th Street. In the end stories of 40 businesses were presented, 31 on window signs at the businesses themselves and 9 on the accompanying map.

Bettina Johae’s projects about the change and perception of cities have been exhibited at the NYPL, ICP, Bronx Museum, Goethe Institute, Aljira, Smack Mellon, NUS Museum Singapore, Maccarone Gallery and at AiOP and Conflux festivals. Awards and residencies include the AIM and EMERGE programs, a DAAD fellowship, the MacDowell Colony, NUS Center for the Arts/Singapore, Pilotprojekt Gropiusstadt/Berlin, SIM/Reykjavik and the VLA Art & Law residency. Her project “borough edges, nyc” is in the photography collection of the NYPL. She holds MAs in Architecture and in Studio Art. Born in Berlin, Germany, she now lives in Brooklyn.