Aporia (—prints, exhibition, publication)
“[Kate’s] black-and-white photographs follow in the footsteps of Diego Velázquez’s An Old Woman Cooking Eggs—and the artistic tradition of celebrating ‘low’ subject matter or, as Velázquez put it, ‘common things’.”
STATEMENT
In a series of minimalist black and white photographs of isolated food items, industrial kitchenware, and cook’s hands, Aporia regards the diner grill as an orchestrated landscape of textures between the raw and cooked.
The photographs were made with a 35mm film camera over a four year period at a truck stop in West Oakland called the Triangle Cafe and a diner in Durham, North Carolina called Honey’s. Diners similar to these punctuated frequent childhood family car trips around the American Southwest. Over every horizon was the “greasy-spoon” and “short-order cook”. This is a nostalgic body of work.
Aporia is a term coined by Plato. It refers to a state of being in which someone is shown they do not know what they thought they knew and in turn are inspired to seek further knowledge. The closest translation from the Greek aporia is “difficulty” (poros—way, a poros—lack of way). This body of work marks the beginning of my interest in using photography to see familiar environments in unfamiliar ways (most recently explored in my series aboard commercial airplanes titled Metaphysics, 2021). In addition, the photographs in Aporia were made at a time when I was struggling to feed myself both physically and spiritually and in that sense they also represent the desire to find a way.
I intuitively titled each individual photograph in the series by reading the English dictionary. Certain imagery seemed to provide the definition of certain words—Effuse, bacon sizzling under a bacon-press; Almost, eggs cooked sunny-side-up; Amendment, a cook’s hand sprinkling ingredients over an omelet. And so on. Ten vocabulary words represent the ten photographs in the Aporia series.
MoCA London director, Michael Petry, wrote about Aporia in Nature Morte: Contemporary Artists Reinvigorate the Still Life, (Thames & Hudson, 2013), “[Kate Joyce’s] black-and-white photographs follow in the footsteps of Diego Velázquez’s An Old Woman Cooking Eggs and the artistic tradition of celebrating ‘low’ subject matter or, as Velázquez put it, ‘common things’.”
EXHIBITION & PUBLICATION HISTORY
2006 Aporia, Victoria Price Contemporary Art & Design, Santa Fe, NM
PRINTS
26 in. x 40 in.
Framed
Edition of 3
Archival pigment print
Signed, dated, titled on verso
