Stephanie Weber
About Stephanie
Stephanie Weber is a writer and researcher based in Calgary, Alberta. She holds an MA (2020) in Art History from Concordia University focused on Canadian visual culture, and she publishes on topics surrounding the social and material histories of architecture and the built environment. She is also an arts and heritage professional, and has worked in an archival and curatorial capacity at galleries and museums across Canada.
More about the project - The Stuff In Between
“Atmosphere,” as a category and concept, is vaguely defined. It is as common to hear the term describing the affective “feeling” of an object or idea as it is to use it in relation to the qualities of the literal air. As a concept, atmosphere sits at the crux of existence and non-existence, often invoked to describe something at the edge of perception: something not necessarily visible, but palpable, collective, and accessible—certainly, something comes to mind when you’re asked to conjure the “atmosphere” of a protest, or of the 1970s, or of an abandoned mall. This is perhaps the reason the term is so often used in writing about visual art, a realm that communicates (usually indirectly) to viewers through the manipulation of various mediums – sometimes creating what can be described as the “feeling” of a piece through colour, sound, or form, sometimes eliciting emotion from viewers with an appeal to pathos through words, music, facial expressions or bodily gestures, and sometimes explicitly altering the qualities of air in an installation space.
Through my residency, I will attempt to come to something approaching a definition of the word “atmosphere” as invoked in art and art writing, teasing out the threads that connect its varying usage by Esse writers throughout the archive.
Esse archived articles referenced:
Patrice Loubier – The Fortuitous Celebration
Caterina Albano – Uncanny: A Dimension in Contemporary Art
