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Space Craft (—prints)

In the series Space Craft, Kate Joyce arranges and photographs anamorphic wedge prisms and isosceles and equilateral triangle prisms of various dimensions during different times of day and weather conditions. Joyce divorces the prisms from the world of color and from their original optical design intent, focusing on their unique reflective and refractive properties, to construct spaces both familiar and unknown.

Notes on Space, Craft, and Prisms

Whether vast or confined, space is the possibility of movement. Light travels, as wave and particle. The body travels, with locomotion and with the senses. Light and the body share this dual nature in forms of travel. Vision is a form of traveling through space. The camera and the photograph could be types of vessel-crafts that carry the eye. In engineering, physics and science fiction, spacecrafts are engaged with the unknown, the unidentifiable, and first encounters.

One meaning of craft n. is “power, physical strength, might”. A craft is a skill. And it's a vessel. A craftsperson can hone space from matter in order to carry objects through space.

Prisms are precision crafted for use in opthamology, microscopy, astronomy. They are used widely in telescopes, binoculars, cd players, submarine periscopes, and prescription lenses. During several Apollo lunar missions, prisms were used to calculate the distance between the moon and earth. Prisms are powerful tools. Even so, with or without these instruments, we still see incorrectly (just as we can hear incorrectly). We mistake something for something else, probably more often than we can know. In English, the words “in” and “out” describe focus. These are spatial words. Space Craft is interested in activating sensations and visual adjusments caused by the high contrast between what is in and what is out of focus.

Prisms are shapes. The word prism comes from the Greek, prisma “a geometrical prism, trilateral column” (Euclid), “something sawed (as a block of wood), sawdust,” from prizein, priein “to saw”. A prism is not space, but it can appear to contain space and be used to create space through architecture. A wedge, a brick, a keystone, a tile—these are all prisms. Space Craft imagines an architecture closer to distilled homeopathic tincture. Is there a connection between the etymology of prism (to saw) and saw, the past tense of the English word see?

Download Information Sheet (Information, Kate Joyce, Space Craft, 2024.pdf) 

Space Craft
Archival pigment prints 
42 x 28 inches
(106.7 x 71.1 cm)
Framed: 48 x 34 x 2 inches
(121.9 x 86.4 x 5.1 cm)
Edition of 3
Signed and dated verso

*Variable sizes available upon request

EMAIL studio (at) kate-joyce.com
STUDIO Santa Fe, New Mexico
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All rights reserved. Kate Joyce 2024