KATE JOYCE: METAPHYSICS (SITE Santa Fe, January 21—April 24, 2022)
Metaphysics is a series of color photographs made on board commercial airplanes.
There is an unreasonableness in our human desire for flight. We are itinerant ‘featherless bipeds’ cocooned in reassuring cabin interiors supported by the mechanics of aerodynamics.
This series of photographs reveals fragments of time's movement through light and space, and highlights the interface of human life and machines.
Human organization closer to a chrysalis than the architecture of flight. A stasis from which passengers will emerge subtly transformed on the far side. And in this confinement that feels close to both birth and death, there is incredible light.
I spent over seven years, between 2012 and 2019, on over 50 airplanes coveting the window seat looking for a variety of illuminated bodies and inhabiting the limbo of airports and strange loneliness of airplanes.
I found the window seat to be its own destination. Something like a studio of constraints. Reduced to limb, drapery, and light we resemble each other, we are repetitions of each other, row by row we are each other’s other.
METAPHYSICS (Hat & Beard Press, 2022)
Metaphysics is the companion monograph for a SITE Santa Fe exhibition featuring Joyce's photographs. Created between 2012 and 2019, during a period when the photographer was regularly commuting by air, this series of photographs highlights the way static images can capture the passage of time, revealing fragments of its movement through light and space.
Excerpt from review by Blake Andrews
Snippets of fingers and book parts are the photographic equivalent of conversational eavesdropping. Joyce seems to be prying, albeit gently. What are her fellow passengers thinking or feeling? Of course there’s no telling, but it’s fun to speculate, with metaphysical implications. “The arm I am looking at in front of or behind me,” she explains to Weschler, “could be seen the same way by that very same person sitting in front of or behind me, were they to train their gaze upon me.”
If this seems like the sort of thought arrived at after many hours trapped in a plane cabin, or perhaps a 2 AM dorm gathering, the “Metaphysical Mechanism” chapter to follow is even more so. In a series of panel grids entitled Art History & The Airline Safety Information Card, Joyce juxtaposes illustrations from safety manuals with art from antiquity. It’s the type of idea which is so wacky it could never work. Or could it? The comparisons are improbably deft, organized into the same rough categories as Joyce’s photos: Drapery, The Hand, Window Light View, Bodies In Space. All are annotated with historical references. Art historians will no doubt recognize many panels, as will frequent flyers. Who knew that a safety card could house such riches?
By this point, we are firmly in metaphysical territory with an absurdist edge. The stage is set for Weschler— …https://collectordaily.com/kate-joyce-metaphysics/
Photographs by Kate Joyce
Afterword by Lawrence Weschler
Edition of 300
Hardcover
96 pages
7 in x 9.5 in
17.78 cm x 24.13 cm
35 color photographs
Hat & Beard Press, Los Angeles
This is a video of our multimedia presentation of Metamorphoses (Special Problems Press, 2021), photographs from Chile by Kate Joyce, with translation by Andrew Berns and live soundscapes by Justin Ray, aka RMX#13. Live recording from event at SITE Santa Fe, March 11, 2022
07:50—34:10 METAMORPHOSES, with Live Soundscape by Justin Ray
ANALOGIES (Special Problems Press, Revised Edition, 2023)
In an analogy, we recognize that two things are, in essence, the same, even if they are superficially quite different. Making analogies is, in the words of the psychologist Robert French, a recognition of the “subtlety of sameness.” —from the foreword by Melanie Mitchell
A visual correspondence between photographer Kate Joyce and graphics software engineer Gordon Cameron. Early in their friendship they left words behind and spontaneously began communicating through pictures and visual rhyme. A practice not uncommon today, although over the course of their five-year exchange (which began in 2016 after meeting at Big Ears) they discovered through photography that the complex and fundamental domain of analogy-creation appears vital and endless.
The project asks how human minds make connections and challenges the idea that artificial intelligence could do the same.
Photographs by Kate Joyce & Gordon Cameron
Foreword by Melanie Mitchell, Davis Professor Santa Fe Institute
Hardcover
550 pages
6 x 9 in.
15.24 x 22.86 cm.
Special Problems Press, Santa Fe
Edition of 100 (20 copies left)
METAMORPHOSES (Special Problems Press, 2021)
Originally I made the photographs in Chile while traveling alone as a teenager. Twenty-years later I discovered the photographs in the work of Ovid.
The book is in English and Latin.
I distilled the myths to an essence. I discovered lines of poetry and photographs that resonated (out of the 1,500 black and white negatives from my travels and the 11,995 lines, 15 books and over 250 myths from Ovid).
I then asked my friend Andrew Berns to make an English translation of those lines.
Alongside Berns' English translation are excerpts of Ovid's poem in Latin that act as a design element and reminder of time and origin.
Kate Joyce’s Metamorphoses transforms Ovid’s collection of myths from the ancient world, written toward the end of his life nearly two thousand years ago, into a photographic journal of contemporary life.
Earthiness, domestic activity, and unlikely female heroines emerge. Themes and stories that historically and predominantly have been described through male narrators and on a European stage are seen in the people, architecture, landscape and animals of a Latin American country—from Santiago to Tierra del Fuego. Gender is fluid. As are place, time and the identity of non-human creatures.
Looking back, these places, people and events, while taken from my own experience, have come to embody near universal figures from myth—and now I see in them the patterns that are universally described as the fate of Apollo & Daphne, Narcissus & Echo, and Orpheus & Eurydice.
Photographs by Kate Joyce (1998-1999 C.E.)
Translated from the Latin by Andrew Berns (2020 C.E.)
With excerpts from The Latin Library’s Metamorphoses by Ovid (c 8 C.E.)
Softcover
7.44 x 9.69 in.
18.9 x 24.61 cm.
250 b&w photographs
672 pages
Special Problems Press, Santa Fe
Edition of 320 (24 copies left)
BIG EARS KNOXVILLE (Hat a& Beard Press 2019) SOLD OUT
To celebrate 10 years of Big Ears, the art and music festival in Knoxville, Tennessee, AC Entertainment, Rock Fish Stew Institute of Literature and Materials, Southern Documentary Fund, and Hat & Beard Press worked closely with artist Kate Joyce—who photographed the festival, the people and surrounds of Knoxville over the last five years—to create a captivating time capsule, both of the last five years of performances at Big Ears and of the lyrical and visual language of Knoxville. Cormac McCarthy’s semi-autobiographical novel, Suttree, is set in his hometown in the 1950s and the city is also immortalized in fellow Knoxvillian James Agee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Death in the Family, both of which get at what Joyce so perfectly captures in her book, Big Ears Knoxville.
The book consists of 69 color and black and white photographs, a preface by music critic Ben Ratliff, essays by musicians Rachel Grimes and Joe Henry, and exclusive streaming access to a selection of audio recordings from performances at Big Ears between 2014-2018. The photographs were made under the influence of the music being performed in intimate venues throughout the city.
As Joyce says: “The location of the festival—and hearing some of the most challenging music in the world—in downtown Knoxville, a city perhaps not expected to be the home of a festival of this quality and caliber, reverberated through all of my senses.”
Between 2014-2018 more than 200 artists and bands performed at Big Ears. During the five years that Joyce traveled to Knoxville for the festival, she photographed some of them, but not nearly all of them—for good reason, as you’ll soon read. Of those she did photograph, a number found their way into the book. Among them are the bands Algiers, Eighth Blackbird and Kronos Quartet, musicians John Luther Adams and his wife Cynthia, Bryce Dessner, Wu Fei, Rachel Grimes, Levon Henry, Julia Holter, Little Annie, Wu Man, Grey McMurray, Guy Picciotto, Terry Riley, Omar Souleyman, Susanna and Abigail Washburn, composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, and conductor Steven Schick with the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra.
“I photographed during some of these performances,” she says, “but most of them were un-photographable (better heard than seen). Sometimes I only photographed a sound check or rehearsal.” Joyce witnessed most of the performances, many were memorable and a few were life changing.
During her time at Big Ears, she explored Knoxville on foot as well, leaving the theaters and clubs to make pictures on the streets. As she wandered, her mind remained tethered to the musical events strewn around downtown Knoxville at various venues. Photographing back and forth between city and festival—and subsequently during the editing process—the experience was an exercise and challenge for Joyce to see and document what was happening as openly and as freely as the music had taught her to listen.
Big Ears Knoxville made its debut at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville in March 2019.
This project was made possible with the support of the Reva and David Logan Foundation, Dan and Gloria Logan, Colin Moran, Visit Knoxville, Moxley Carmichael, Knoxville Museum of Art, Dewhurst Properties and The Tomato Head, in partnership with Rock Fish Stew Institute of Literature and Materials, AC Entertainment, The Southern Documentary Fund, the Contemporary Art Museum Raleigh, and The Paris Review.
Hardcover, 136 pages
8 x 12 in. / 20.32 x 30.48 cm.
69 color + b&w photographs
Edition of 400
Photographs by Kate Joyce
Preface by Ben Ratliff
Essays by Rachel Grimes and Joe Henry
Music by Sam Amidon, Laurie Anderson, Bryce Dessner, Mats Eilersten, Diamanda Galás, Kronos Quartet, Wu Man, The Necks, Meshell Ndegeocello, Nils Okland, Yuki Numata Resnick, Terry Riley, and Jenny Scheinman.
Designed by Sabrina Che and Ben Schwartz
“In the age of increasingly “intelligent” machines, what core aspects of humanness can we hold on to? For me, this book of visual analogies provides an unexpected answer. Kate and Gordon’s imaginative juxtapositions are, above all, a riff on the rich meanings that we humans can so fluidly elicit from photographs, that is, from arrays of colors on a page. Moreover, Kate and Gordon’s visual dialogue illustrates how our human communication itself is based on an analogy—you are like me—and thus we can share these meanings via our common experience. This mutual understanding is beyond even the smartest machines, which remain blocked by what the philosopher Gian Carlo Rota called “the barrier of meaning”. Human understanding is a barrier that can be unlocked only through our shared analogies.”
“The ‘dead’ void may become ‘live’, or ‘magnetic’.”
“I spend a lot of time in airplanes, and this photograph captures something elusive and true about the experience. It has the informality of a snapshot and the formality of portraiture, and it reminds me how accurate a description it is to say that you went somewhere far away in a thermos.”
“Imagination manifests transformation.”
“In these photographs, I feel the energy of true engagement, and see, too, my own experiences reflected back. And I hear them. They are roaring back like silence.”
“Kate Joyce’s typologies are some of my favorite photographs. She took some ninety thousand pictures over roughly a thousand hours in preparing for and realizing the BCS project. But these grouped photographs—the lawn darts, the abandoned concessions, the white smudges made by balls hitting the Blue Monster in left field—are the clearest indication that she, like me, was trying to make sense of a game that is as much about ritual as it is about rules. These accumulations make up a pattern, a vocabulary, through which Joyce can begin to understand the larger language.”
“[Kate’s] black-and-white photographs follow in the footsteps of Diego Velázquez’s An Old Woman Cooking Eggs (see page 10) and the artistic tradition of celebrating ‘low’ subject matter or, as Velázquez put it, ‘common things’.”
“But for all the horrific singularity of his acts, de Kock was a desperate soul, seeking to affirm to himself that he was still part of the human universe.”
SOLO-ARTIST BOOKS Metaphysics (Hat & Beard Press Fall 2022) Metamorphoses (Special Problems Press 2021) Big Ears Knoxville (Hat and Beard Press 2019) MULTIPLE-ARTIST BOOK PUBLICATIONS include Analogies (Special Problems Press 2021) Nature Morte: Contemporary Artists Reinvigorate the Still Life Tradition (Thames & Hudson), Bull City Summer (Daylight Books), Through the Lens: Creating Santa Fe (Museum of New Mexico Press), and Hollow City:The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism (Verso). WORKS PUBLISHED BY Harper’s Magazine, BLAU International, The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily, The Chicagoan, Architect Magazine, Manoa Journal and The New York Times. IN THE COLLECTIONS OF Museum of New Mexico Palace of the Governors, NM; North Carolina Museum of Art, NC; Duke University Perkins Library Special Collections & Rare Book Archive, NC; The Cassilhaus Collection, NC; and the JPMorgan Chase Art Collection, NY. SOLO EXHIBITIONS include SITE Santa Fe; Santa Fe Institute; Rick Wester Fine Art, New York; RTKL Chicago Gallery, Chicago; Experimental Sound Studio/Audible Gallery, Chicago; Duke University, Durham, NC. GROUP EXHIBITIONS include Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; Obscura Gallery, Santa Fe; Guildhall Art Gallery, London; North Carolina Museum of Art, NC; Contemporary Art Museum Raleigh, NC; The Ukrainian Museum of Modern Art, Chicago; Nasher Museum of Art, NC; and Museum of New Mexico Palace of the Governors, NM.
EMAIL studio (at) kate-joyce.com
STUDIO Santa Fe, New Mexico
All rights reserved. Kate Joyce 2024