Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo

Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo is a digital artist, technologist and educator. She is particularly interested in time and transience. Her artwork has been internationally exhibited and performed, including at Giacobetti Paul Gallery, Exit Art and HERE Arts (NYC), UCLA Hammer Museum (LA), Point Éphémère (Paris) and the Museums of Modern Art in Bogotá and Medellín (Colombia). She recently self-published “Of and In Cities,” an academically framed art book about five of her photographic projects, and “Cross Urban,” which documents the first two years of an ongoing collaboration with Klaus Fruchtnis. Cynthia has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá) and a Masters in Interactive Telecommunications (ITP) from New York University. She is currently Assistant Professor of Integrated Design in the School of Design Strategies at Parsons The New School for Design and a founding member of Occupy University.

PDF version of my artist resume // PDF version of my academic CV

I can be reached via email [cynthia] at [cynthialawson] dot com or by leaving a comment on any post or page in this site. Feel free to also follow me on Twitter: @cynthialawson and subscribe to my pages on Flickr, YouTube, and Vimeo. (ah, social media!)

Artist Statement

The focus of my work is the exploration of time and the everyday, with work ranging from textual interactive pieces to sculpture with embedded electronics to digital photography. I am interested in capturing and re-presenting fleeting moments, both in digital/virtual interactions as well as in physical space.

My practice intends to slow viewers’ sense of time by protagonizing the everyday as defined by transient space and make them aware of their own quotidianity. It is my hope that the viewer will reflect on their own existence, and become hyper aware of the small moments from which we now quickly disconnect: the stranger passing by carrying groceries, the voicemail awaiting to be heard, commuters rushing to catch the train.

My image-based works exist in the moment between still and moving image. I use photography as a time-based medium, pushing each image far from the expected notions of the “still” and “paused”.

Layering is a principal strategy via which I address temporal moments within each print. In Hidden Choreographies (Pompidou from Above, 2008, and most recently, The Shops 96 Seconds, 2010) I address the concepts of time and space in a single location. In multiple photographs, the repeated (and extracted) presence of figures in each frame demonstrate that these apparently different moments actually happened in the same place and at the same time. The chaos and complexity that one would not necessarily witness when viewing at transient public space, in which nothing seemingly happens, emerges through in the relationship between the images. Although shot in half-second intervals, viewers perceive the resulting piece through the expansion of time in transient public space.

In the case of Nooks and Beaubourg, 36 Seconds, the work is presented in light boxes in which photographs on transparency and duratrans are physically layered. For Beaubourg, 36 Seconds an additional layer of video is inserted into the piece. Various temporal moments are superimposed to create “still” works in constant motion – moving from one layer to the next as a space over time is described.

Since 1999, I have been recording my voicemails, and have started to share these recordings through seven annotated videos in which I contextualize the sound of the message with text captions. Voicemail Diaries is an ongoing repository of each voicemail I’ve stored – a database that gives permanence to my everyday’s fleeting moments. It is my hope that reflecting on the transience of my private space, via these voicemails, will encourage viewers to slow down and appreciate the seemingly banal in their own lives.