Monday, November 29, 2010

The Center for Photography at Woodstock -NYC Portfolio Review-12/10/10



Sign up now and see you December 10!

Join CPW for a very special portfolio review event where you’ll have the opportunity to show your work to some of the most distinguished and important professionals in photography today. Held in NYC, in a supportive setting, you will have your work reviewed by five noted luminaries in one-on-one twenty-minute sessions. Reviews can provide you with constructive feedback, new directions, and perhaps that jolt of inspiration to take the next step. Testimonies from last year’s participants included: “great feedback by committed and engaged reviewers”, “informative and inspirational”, “one-of-a-kind, unpretentious, and fun”, “a great place to trade ideas”, “encouraging, helpful, and insightful”, “I got what I was looking for and made connections”, “open minded, honest, and thoughtful”, “it changed me and helps break barriers to the NY art world”.
The reviewers in the DECEMBER will include Debra Klomp Ching, co-owner of the KlompChing Gallery, Rick Wester, founder of Rick Wester Fine Art, Ruben Natal-San Miguel, Editor in Chief of the ARTmostfierce Arts BlogRebecca Horne of Discover Magazine, and Craig Cohen, Executive Publisher at powerHouse books.  Additionally a representative from CPW will also be reviewing work at each session.   
Please bring:  a portfolio of 10-20 prints for review, resume, and optional artist statement 
Class limit: 12 
Tuition: 
$255 / CPW members: $225
NYC location directions will be sent upon registration confirmation.The reviews will take place from 10:30am-4:30pm
http://www.cpw.org

Saturday, November 27, 2010

Slideluck NYC Auction Preview- Dec 8. 2010

Take a look a the slideshow auction preview to benefit NYC Slideluck Potshow happening Dec. 8, 2010. For a more accurate viewing please use this link: http://network.slideluckpotshow.com/photo/photo/slideshow?albumId=2028077:Album:72353

Thursday, November 25, 2010

Family- A online exhibition curated by Aline Smithson

Aline Smithson, Thanksgiving 2009

A pretty cool on line exhibition inspired by the Thanksgiving Holiday curated by
Photographer and friend Aline Smithson at her wonderful blog Lenscratch tilted FAMILY is up now . Take a look . One of the photographs selected for it is one of my own shown above on my blog header.

 http://lenscratch.blogspot.com/2010/11/family.html

Happy Thanksgiving!

To you all, readers, followers, friends, artists etc, etc...Have a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday!
Photo - Ruben Natal-San Miguel
Here at home recovering. This morning, there was a fire across from my patio/yard so,  had to leave my apt. with Gia at hand due to the amount of smoke. The good thing was that today, I used my camera for the first time since my sickness and was able to document the whole event. More than ever now, have the most utter respect for firefighters and the work they do to save lives. Nobody got hurt but, my neighbors lost their homes.
Think how lucky you are today, be grateful and pray for the most unfortunate ones.

Big love,
Ruben

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Paris Photo BMW Prize 2010

Carlo Van de Roer-''Miranda July''


I was rooting  from my sick bed  for Carlo Van de Roer to win the Paris Photo 2010 BMW prize. He did not win but, received an honorable mention! 
Congratulations Carlo! 
Very proud of you!!!


PARIS— Amidst 20 finalists, a curious public, and copious champagne, Gábor Ösz won the BMW Prize at Paris Photo on Wednesday. The award comes with a purse of €12,000 ($16,000). Taking the honor in stride, the Hungarian photographer thanked Paris's Loevenbruck Gallery, adding, "Am I surprised? No, not really. Actually, maybe a little bit."
To create his prize-winning work "Permanent Daylight," Ösz transformed a trailer into a giant camera obscura. Parked near agricultural greenhouses, the trailer captured the structures' light emissions for four nights. "It was also important to talk about this daytime light, which makes things grow," the artist said.

The committee was unanimous in its selection of Ösz, and also granted honorable mention to New Zealander Carlo Van de Roer, whose "Miranda July" — a portrait of the artist infused with shades of blue — was taken with a modified Polaroid camera. Paris Photo director Guillaume Piens noted that the finalists hailed from 13 different countries, adding that "it's not a Franco-French prize. Its international reach continues to grow."

Friday, November 19, 2010

Tracey Emin & Jasper Jones-Works On Whatever

Get your new Collectable towel before or while in Miami during Art Basel!

ARTmostfierce Affordable Print Pick of the Week- Brian Ulrich for Humble Arts Foundation

Brian Ulrich, JC Penney, Dixie Square Mall, 2009, pigmented archival inkjet print, 8 x 10 in., Ed. of 20
Still sick in bed but my eyes and ears are very alert....so here!
This print is fabulous and at edition of only 20 ...come on folks!
Also with this purchase Humble Arts Foundation will give you a Friendship Level Membership.
A Win -Win !
Happy Shopping!








Brian Ulrich Limited Edition Print



Ulrich focuses on themes of consumer culture in his works. He describes the background behind his Copia project (2002-2006), stating:


“In 2001 citizens were encouraged to take to the malls to boost the U.S. economy through shopping, thereby equating consumerism with patriotism. The Copia project, a direct response to that advice, is a long-term photographic examination of the peculiarities and complexities of the consumer-dominated culture in which we live. Through large scale photographs taken within both the big-box retail stores, and the thrift shops that house our recycled goods, Copia explores not only the everyday activities of shopping, but the economic, cultural, social, and political implications of commercialism and the roles we play in self-destruction, over consumption, and as targets of marketing and advertising. By scrutinizing these rituals and their environments, I hope that viewers will evaluate the increasing complexities of the modern world and their role within it”.


Since we ultimately see ourselves in these images, I aim to elicit compassion and empathy for those depicted by creating formal images that are elegant and beautiful. By combined photographs taken candidly with a medium-format film camera outfitted with a waist-level viewfinder and available light, and the large format studied compositions in thrift shops, I can capture lost excitement and overwhelmed, subsumed moments. The large-scale prints allow the viewer to stop and notice with a distanced perspective familiar places and things. Over time these images take on new meaning, ones anthropological and historical of an affluent society at the dawn of the 21st century. Our experience and history of this time is evidenced in what we buy and what we use up.”


Ulrich continues to explore themes of consumer culture in the U.S. in his later projects Thrift (2005-2007) and Dark Stores (2008-2009). These two series address the hardships of the downturned economy and the failure of consumerism to prevent the closing of many large retail establishments. Together they form a decade-long project under the Copia umbrella. An exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art is planed for 2011/2012 with an accompanying monograph.

Anselm Kiefer @ Larry Gagosian Gallery

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
Anselm Kiefer’s “Cetus,” part of his ambitious exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery. 

This show is so amazing ...you got to go and see it!
 I made the journey from a sick bed to see it. He has not shown since 2003.


Please read NY Times review by Roberta Smith

The German artist Anselm Kiefer knows how to put on a show. The dour and dusty copse of art with which he has forested the vastGagosian Gallery in Chelsea may elicit awe, skepticism or disdain — or perhaps a conflicted combination of all three. But its initial power is hard to deny.

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This is Mr. Kiefer’s first exhibition in New York in eight years and possibly the best he has ever mounted in the city, at least on his own terms. Those terms value theatricality, moral instruction and a variety of materials and objects — natural, artistic, industrial, found, made — employed with brutish verve.
His new works blend painting, sculpture and set design; incorporate elements of filmmaking, performance and photography; and marshal the forces of history, literature and religious thought. They demonstrate his ineluctable progress within the presumptuous Wagnerian tradition of the gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art. This evolution was undoubtedly aided by ambitious undertakings like a2007 solo show at the cavernous Grand Palais in Paris and “In the Beginning,” a 2009 primal theater work in Paristhat was evidently mostly music- and plot-free, made in collaboration with the composer and clarinetist Jörg Widmann.
Portentously titled “Next Year in Jerusalem,” the Gagosian exhibition is effective middlebrow art as catharsis, spectacle with a message. As with many a successful Broadway drama, we leave feeling that our heartstrings have been exercised or at least manipulated. We’ve been through the ringer, and it was awesome. Now 65, Mr. Kiefer began his career in the late 1960s on the cusp of Post-Minimalism, an admiring student of Joseph Beuys working in the triangle of Conceptual art, photography and performance. In his best-known work from that period, he documented himself delivering the Nazi salute on once-occupied lands, often in his father’s Nazi uniforms. But he rode to fame in the 1980s as a Neo-Expressionist painter, and then kept moving toward increasingly theatrical mixings of mediums.
He’s been on his own now for a couple of decades, a philosopher-showman with an immense following whose art popularizes Post-Minimalism’s strategies with the use of big, accessible themes. His main theme is Germanness and its discontents, of which he is a prime example. He was born in the last weeks of World War II, and the human cost and devastation of that conflict remain the spine and the hook of his art.
Mr. Kiefer’s latest efforts take the ash-strewn, desiccated wasteland where his art has long dwelt to new, enveloping extremes. The Gagosian space is crowded with 25 sculptures encased in large, often towering vitrines with floors of cracked (or scorched) earth. Each contains a sinister ruin: the fuselage or engine of a vintage airplane; a fleet of small suspended U-boats made of lead; a white plaster ball or wedding gown jagged with shards of glass; an immense and brittle thorn bush dotted with painted flames.
There are giant burned books of lead and paper; Jacob’s Ladder, also in lead; and Lilith’s dresses in sackcloth. Titles scrawled on the vitrines ricochet from fact to faith and back: “Flying Fortress,” “The Red Sea,” “Valentinus” (a second-century Gnostic theologian), “Thora” (a Norse goddess represented by a typewriter made of lead).
There are occasional moments of amusing self-reference. In the vitrine-sculpture “Zerstörung des Tempels” (“The Destruction of the Temple”) strands of repeating images suggest giant filmstrips of a bombed building but document a sculpture from Mr. Kiefer’s Grand Palais exhibition. The strips occur in other pieces, always accompanied by an outsize film reel and canister made of soft lead that form one of the show’s best details. They evoke Beuys, the young Richard Serra and Claes Oldenburg all at once.
Meanwhile the gallery walls are ringed with paint-encrusted landscapes of the panoramic kind that have long been part of Mr. Kiefer’s repertory. Mountains loom above snowy fields spiked with dead stalks. Winged palettes hover over expanses of gray ocean. And then there is the show’s heart of darkness: “Occupations,” a large steel shed that evokes box cars, crematoria, barracks or meat lockers. Visible through its many doors, shaggy photographs hang from hooks like enormous pelts. They are the images from Mr. Kiefer’s 1970s world tour of Nazi salutes — blown up and mounted on lead on burlap. Their loaded repackaging here signifies his expanded ambition, and a determination that we not miss the point. Never forget. Ever.
To wander among these works is to participate in a performance piece of the artist’s devising. The sheer density of the installation gives it an almost interactive, relational-aesthetics quality. As we gawk, peer and crane, decipher the titles and mull over the allusions — all the while avoiding collisions with other similarly engaged people — we form a cast of extras trapped in some museum of devastation.
It’s the dustbin of history expanded into giant prop storage in a theater where death and destruction prevail, but various ancient faiths offer the possibility of redemption. And yet really giving in to the work requires suspending the suspicion that religion and faith are not part of the solution. They are most of the problem.
There’s a disconnect in most of these pieces between the ideas and the extravagant materiality. The themes are rarely in the forms; they’re more in the titles, their explanations or the heavy-handed associations, not to mention the extensive Anselm Kiefer glossary on the Web site, which accounts for the feeling of being manipulated. The strongest, freshest paintings — which are also glass-encased and depict wintery sun-shot expanses of barren trees — personify the emotional push-pull typical of Mr. Kiefer’s art.
Heavy with paint yet photographic in depth, these images are banked with more dried bushes, cast-resin ferns and occasionally strewn with large, synthetic teeth and snakeskins. They look a little like neglected shop windows, yet they achieve a stark, haunting beauty even as they rather too obviously evoke the kind of woods where refugees hide.
Three are titled “Merkaba,” which means, roughly, vehicle of enlightenment. A fourth, with a U-boat lurking in the bushes, is titled “Fitzcarraldo,” evoking the grandiose determination of both the 19th-century Peruvian rubber baron Carlos Fitzcarrald, who transported a 30-ton steamboat over a mountainous isthmus for business purposes, andWerner Herzog, who made a back-breaking movie about it.
Mr. Kiefer has become better and better at making Anselm Kiefers. In them grandiosity rarely takes a holiday. A very few pieces here stand on their own as visual and emotional entities. One is “Steigend steigend sinke nieder” (“Rising, rising, falling down”), a tall vitrine occupied by a cluster of giant white cast-resin sunflowers growing downward from its ceiling. These mysterious creature-plants resemble mushrooms, but they turn heliotropically upward as if seeking the sun. They’re alive.
“Anselm Kiefer: Next Year in Jerusalem” runs through Dec. 18 at the Gagosian Gallery, 555 West 24th Street, Chelsea; (212) 741-1111 or gagosian.com.



Wednesday, November 17, 2010

NYC Slideluck Launch Party + Fundraiser 12/8/10



My Girl with curlers photograph will be  at the NYC Slideluck Launch Party + Fundraiser up for auction. Hosted by Photographer Patrick McMullan and Paul D, Miller you know is going to be a fabulous event with plenty of flashbulbs and quite a  glittery scene. Come over, party, place a bid and take it her home. The other version of this photograph is almost sold out. This one is still a virgin... so ha ha! 


 Not dead yet , just home recovering so...see you at the event!

 Ruben Natal-San Miguel
Glamour Break Diva, 2009 Harlem, NYC
16 x 20 framed
C-print
Artists proof
Courtesy of the artist


NYC Slideluck Launch Party + Fundraiser


In efforts to foster new and creative collaborations with the food community, we are launching SLIDELUCK, almost 10 years to the day that SLIDELUCK POTSHOW first began.

SLIDELUCK is a slideshow but not a potluck dinner - rather it is a collaboration with a chef, restaurant, farm or supper club. Rather than presenting 40 local artists, this version will be shorter and sweeter, showcasing up to 20 artists.

The NYC launch of SLIDELUCK will take place on Wednesday, December 8th at the lovely Sandbox Studio, a spacious, 11th-floor space on the SoHo/TriBeCa border. The event will be a fundraiser and auction: all proceeds will go to the 501c3, SLIDELUCK POTSHOW and its community-outreach program, the Slideluck Youth Initiative.


Patrick McMullan and Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky) invite you to participate in an exclusive cocktail hour with the artists that are participating in the live and silent auctions, followed by an a delicious, locally-sourced dinner orchestrated by the Highlands Dinner Club, beer provided by Brooklyn Brewery, wine poured by the Noble Rot, and culminating with an unforgettable slideshow of work by both local and international artists. Music provided by World Up.

TICKETS:
6:30pm Cocktail Reception with Hosts/Artists + Dinner + Slideshow +...
7:30pm Dinner + Slideshow + Auctions: $125

Unavailable on this date, but would like to make a contribution regardless? Please click here.

* The Cocktail Reception will be limited to 50 guests.
* The dinner will be limited to 200 guests.

Artists Participating in Auction:

Gema Alava * Marisa Baumgartner * Yasmina Belkacem * Julie Blackmon * Elinor Carucci * Zoe Crosher * Joey Frank * John Gordon Gauld * Andrew Hetherington * Casey Kelbaugh * Wilmot Kidd * Vincent Laforet * Coke O'Neal * Stephen Mallon * Alyssa Monks * Amy Morkin * Roz Morris * Ruben Natal-SanMiguel * Jonah Samson * Jennifer Shaw * Susanna Sinclair * Sarah Small * Cameron Sterling * Phillip Toledano * Spencer Tunick * Martin Usborne * Jan Van Holleben * Sophia Wallace * Jamie Ziobro

Committee Co-Chairs:
Patrick McMullan * Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky)

Host Committee
Gema Alava * Anne Kettle Baker * Ebenezer Bond * Hilary Bowers * Jeffrey Caldwell * Catherine Blair Carlson * Kipton Cronkite * Michael Dabbene * Amber De Vos * Katie Eckert * Mandie Erickson * Michael Foley * Christina Gee * John Gordon Gauld * Fernanda Giligan * Carson Gray * Bingo Gubelmann * Kristy Caylor Hamilton * Ginger Harper * Leslie Ballard Hull * Brooks Houston * Be Inthavong * Ryan Jones * Merel le Conge Kleyn * Adam Laukhuf * Page Leidy * Dave Lombino * James Lowther * Elissa Lumley * Rachel Markus * Andy McNicol * Heather Miles * Chris Miller * Jackie Nasser * Lizzie & Kathy Nastro * Vanessa Noel * Camille Obering * Caspar Ouvaroff * Kelli Porterfield * Bettina Prentice * Evan Ruster * Georgina Schaeffer * Katie Schwab * Adam Sherwin * Henry Simonds * Savannah Spirit * Julie Taraska * Nilani Trent


In collaboration with: Patrick McMullan * DJ Spooky * Sandbox Studio * Brooklyn Brewery *Highlands Dinner Club * World Up * Bron Imaging * Perrier * The Noble Rot

Monday, November 15, 2010

THANK YOU!

Many thanks to all the ones who took time out their busy schedule to either stop by the hospital , gave me a call, sent  e-mail, sent flowers or simply sent well wishes and good energy my way. I know who you are and kept a record of it. It is great to now that all my efforts over the years had at lest surrounded me with some compassionate, genuine and real people. For the ones who did not , I am keeping that on mind for the next time while air kissing at an art opening/event or when you might need something from me.

At home recovering...


Big Love,
Ruben

Thursday, November 11, 2010

On Hiatus, after a close call with Death

Artmostfierce Art Blog will be in temporary hiatus till further notice.

5 days later after almost going into coma, a close call to death and being in a emergency room and hospital, I face the world as a newly diagnosed diabetic. 


Yes, I am very sick and recovering and NO,  can't  or will do any more favors posting request etc, etc.
Wish me luck !


Ruben

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

ARTmostfierce Affordable Print Pick of the Week- Erwin Olaf Portfolio

This Portfolio by renowned world class photographer Erwin Olaf is a must have. This is a great and one of a kind opportunity to have a self portrait triptych of this master photographer. I am getting mine... get yours today. Don't wait too long!  This portfolio will be featured at upcoming Paris Photo and Miami Art Basel Art fair its price will go up and so its chances getting a good deal . It will sell out soon. Needless to say that is  a good investment .  For more info please contact Kellie McLaughlin at kmclaughlin@aperture.org.

Happy Shopping!
Erwin Olaf- I  Wish

Erwin Olaf- I  AM


Erwin Olaf-  I Will Be


I WISH, I AM, I WILL BE, 2009 Portfolio

Erwin Olaf

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Available
$ 1,800.00
This item is excluded from all promotions
3 Lamda prints
Image size:13 x 10 in.
Paper size:13 3/4 x 10 7/8 in.

Edition: 35 and no Artists Proofs
Each print is signed and numbered by the Artist

http://www.aperture.org/olaf-portfolio.html
Aperture is pleased to offer these three very special works in a beautiful clothbound portfolio case—packaged with a documentary about the artist by Dutch director Michiel van Erp, Erwin Olaf: Beyond the Fall.

Price to increase as edition sells through.

description

Limited-Edition Portfolio of Photographs by Erwin Olaf

Internationally acclaimed Dutch photographer Erwin Olaf delivers strong emotional impact with his highly stylized mode of image making. On the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, the artist turned his lens on himself,
creating a series of illustrative self portraits to mark the occasion. With
 self-explanatory titles, the works in the Self Portrait - 50 Years Old 
series depict how the artist looks now, how he wishes he looked now, and 
forecasts how he will look in the future. Olaf speaks not only to his own 
aging, but to our culture's obsession with youth and beauty and the
 prevalent use of post-production techniques like Photoshop, particularly in
the world of fashion photography to create unrealistic notions and
expectations of those very things.

Aperture published the artist¹s monograph, Erwin Olaf, in 2008.

Erwin Olaf (born in Hilversum, the Netherlands, 1959) is a commercial and fine art photographer. He graduated from the Utrecht School for Journalism 
in 1980 with a degree in newspaper journalism and photojournalism. Olaf has 
earned several Silver Lions for his commercial work, which is increasingly 
sought after by magazines such as the New York Times Magazine, London Sunday
 Times, and Vanity Fair. He is represented by Flatland Gallery, Utrecht/Paris
and Hasted Hunt Krauetler, New York.