Kate Joyce b. 1979

"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. In the beginning I photographed the aerial view out the window — a cold, detached, and mesmerizing blueprint. Over time I discovered a more intimate view within the aircraft —bodies, sunlight, hands, and drapery. 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."

- Kate Joyce