Atmosphere No.2, 2023. Fog, LED, and plastic.

The Atmosphere Project

With my atmosphere project, I’m evoking the intuitive, somatic, and non-cognitive and questioning how spirituality can hold these spaces.  This work engages the architecture and manipulates its standard program in these gestures. Liminal or mundane spaces like corners or hallways become moments of significance.  I use LED lights, clear plastic sheeting, and fog machines to make a micro-atmosphere. When the fog machine is activated, the space fills and is illuminated with a numinous effect. Because of the thermodynamic and fluid properties of the hot fog in the piece, a gentle motion continues even after the fog machine stops.

I think about the late Robert Irwin describing Malevich’s Black Square: “Everyone looked around and moaned, ‘Oh no, everything we love is gone’ And instead he replied, ‘As, but we have found a desert of pure feeling!. One could’ve easily equated those empty squares with the loss of God, the end of culture, the horror of death… But I’m convinced that Malevich drew on the opposite tradition: the phenomenological.  Instead of angst, he’s telling you, ‘Wonder! Wow! A desert of pure feeling!” .

In the minimalism of this gesture, I’m inviting the viewer into an embodied experience where they can meet the work but also the experiences of their perception and the changes in their nervous systems. With this work, I’m thinking of the positive cognitive benefits of light, the effect of “soft focus” on the nervous system (ex. watching a campfire or water movement), and the spiritual and psychosomatic implications of the breath/breathwork/breathing (the greek word for breath, “pneuma”, being the same word for spirit).

Earlier Iterations