Image above: ©Angela Smith, “User Interface Landscape”, Site Specific 30/100, 4x6 Digital Photographic Print. Courtesy of Viridian Artists Gallery.

Viridian Artists presented on April 9th, Angela Christine Smith's first solo exhibit at Viridian. 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.

Angela Smith during the opening night at Viridian Gallery.

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.

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©Angela Smith, “User Interface Landscape”, Site Specific 30/100. Courtesy of Viridian Artists Gallery.

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.

Viridian Gallery on the opening night.

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).