Angela Christine Smith. Augmented Her: afaik;ATM

About

Chelsea NY: Viridian Artists is pleased to present Angela Christine Smith’s first solo exhibit at Viridian. A winner in Viridian’s Juried Photography exhibit in 2011, the artist will be present at both the reception on Thursday April 9th, 6-8pm & on Saturday April 11, 4-6PM when she will talk about her fascinating photographic response to our future. The exhibit will continue from April 7th to April 25th.

The future has arrived and the title of Angela Smith’s first solo exhibition at Viridian is a testament to that reality. When asked what the meaning of the title was, the artist replied that the title “is an indication of where I am at in this moment.” Expanded it reads: “Augmented her: as far as I know; at this moment”.

Angela Christine Smith specializes in Photographic Practices that utilize Advanced Darkroom (Analog) Techniques and expand into Advanced Digital Practices. As an artist she also specializes in printmaking techniques that inform her overall artistic practice. Through these mediums she explores her identity as a subject and her interaction with the photographic machine. Through the use of self-portraits, selfies and the manipulations of digital practices, she is exploring those unseen moments where her relationship with life, with the camera, and with the photograph (as object) is evidence of the materiality of identity.

Smith is interested in the medium of photography and the relationship created between the camera and the “self” or the subject, which is “her”. Like the movie with Scarlett Johansson, her MFA show was titled “Her”, but rather than a body being just a digital voice, Smith explores through her work, the stasis of the image created from a live body – her own – and making it stasis or immovable. At the same time, she is exploring the materiality of the photographic process as she exposes the body (and self) as an object of stasis.

The greater identity of “her” (her is the self cut from time when the camera cuts the body from the self and contains it within the photograph) is not limited to the photograph. “Her” is now digital and larger than ever before. “Her” now takes on this post-Internet art by taking on the challenges of digital dualism – that space where we conceptualize the digital and the physical; the on and off -line realities.

Identity is now a cyborg self comprised of a physical body and a digital one. Augmented Her is the expansion of identity beyond the photographic object and time. Augmented Her is now in constant dialog with both, and in the digital realm the glitch, (the glitch art, the digital interruptions) interrupts the viewer and reminds us that “her” is Afk (away from keyboard) ATM (at the moment).

So the identity is expanding and what is Afk vs IRL? (Away from keyboard; in real life).

The artist received her BFA from Savannah College of Art and Design in photography and printmaking and her MFA in Photography and Integrated Media from Ohio University.