Metaphysics is a series of color photographs made on board 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. 

Here is photographer Kate Joyce on the idea behind Metaphysics:

"In the beginning I photographed the aerial view out the window—a cold, detached, and mesmerizing blueprint. Overtime I discovered a more intimate view within the aircraft: bodies, sunlight, hands, and drapery. Human organization closer to a chrysalis than the architecture of flight. And in this confinement that feels close to both birth and death, there is incredible light. I spent seven years, between 2012 and 2019, on over 50 airplanes coveting the window seat, looking for a variety of illuminated bodies—inhabiting the strange limbo of airports and loneliness of airplanes. I found the window seat to be its own destination and something like a studio of constraints." 

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.

Kate Joyce (b. 1979) is an artist using photography to explore interfaces between the ordinary and extraordinary. Her work is informed by the geometry of light and space along with documentary processes and remains attuned to elements of ambiguity and mystery. Often employing typologies, relationships between pictures and literature, and collaboration. In 2022, Metaphysics, a series of color photographs made from her window seat onboard airplanes, was exhibited at SITE Santa Fe, with a companion publication by Hat & Beard Press. Kate designs and self-publishes under her imprint Special Problems Press. Metamorphoses (Special Problems Press, 2021) 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 seen through a series of photographs made 20-years ago in Chile. With a new and collaborative English translation from the Latin by longtime friend and historian Andrew Berns. Analogies (Special Problems Press, 2021) is a visual correspondence between Kate Joyce and software engineer Gordon Cameron that asks how human minds make connections and challenges the idea that artificial intelligence could do the same. Her book Big Ears Knoxville (Hat & Beard Press, 2019) chronicles life on and off the stage and in the streets at a music festival and the town where the festival takes place, with essays by musicians Rachel Grimes and Joe Henry, preface by Ben Ratliff, and a hand selected soundtrack from live recordings at Big Ears, in collaboration with Rock Fish Stew Institute of Literature and Materials. Kate grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She studied photojournalism and sociology at San Francisco State University; Spanish in Guatemala and Chile; and documentary photography at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Kate received a Lewis Hine Documentary Initiative Fellowship (2003-2004) during which she worked in Bloemfontein, South Africa. In 2010 she founded Kate Joyce Studios to manage her freelance commercial architectural photography commissions. Since 2016 Kate has been based in her home town.

Lawrence Weschler (b. 1952, Van Nuys, California), a graduate of Cowell College of the University of California at Santa Cruz (1974), was for over 20 years (1981-2002) a staff writer at The New Yorker, where his work shuttled between political tragedies and cultural comedies. From 2001 through 2014 he was the director, now emeritus, of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, where he also taught a graduate course in “The Fiction of Nonfiction.” He has also been the artistic director, also now emeritus, of the Chicago Humanities Festival and was a sometime curator of Bill T Jones’ New York Live Ideas annual festival. Over the years he has been a contributing editor at McSweeney’s, The Threepenny Review, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, and has contributed regularly to the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair, The Believer, Harper’s and NPR. He is the author of coming on 20 books, including Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees (his life of artist Robert Irwin); Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences; Vermeer in Bosnia, and most recently, his memoir of his 35-year friendship with the neurologist Oliver Sacks, And How Are You, Doctor Sacks? Meanwhile, for over a year now, he has been producing Wondercabinet: A Compendium of the Miscellaneous Diverse, his fortnightly substack. For more, see his website at www.lawrenceweschler.com.