Alfonso Jaramillo: Versus Artifice

I like to work with found objects, both natural and artificial, in order to explore the social landscape. I focus on objects that have a very personal or collective emotional content that is readily accessible, such as human hair, and then integrate it as raw material into installation and graphic work. Versus Artifice is an on-going project that documents, through photographs, a series of interventions juxtapozing natural and artifcial elements. I will be showing some of these photos along with an installation I am building for the show. I won't give away what it is but I will say that it explores connections between five cases of genocide in the 20th and 21st centuries, including the Chilean coup of 1973 and the demolition of the World Trade Center in 2001.


Alfonso Jaramillo is a visual artist and graphic designer based in Berkeley, California. Over the last ten years, Alfonso has designed for a number of organizations and institutions that serve the public interest and work toward both socially and economically sustainable forms of development through his practice, iarte design. With a multidisciplinary, investigative approach to design, drawing on social as well as visual research methods, Alfonso has integrated anthropological tactics into his creative arsenal and received critical praise for his experimental and participatory design techniques. A native of Chile, Alfonso lived in exile with his family in Mexico from 1976 to 1982, and in the US, as an illegal immigrant until 1988 when he returned to Chile for the first time after 12 years. He moved to the Bay Area in 1991 to attend UC Berkeley where he studied political economy and anthropology. Alfonso attended graduate school at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2003 and is currently design editor for Greater Good Magazine.