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Between infinitude and a negation of extension, between an infinitude and a negation of number, between an infinitude and a negation of movement, between an infinitude and a negation of time. From which we may learn to estimate ourselves and our true value, and to form reflections which will be worth more than all the rest of geometry.
—Blaise Pascal, The Geometrical Spirit

I remember hours of silver and light
—Rimbaud, Vies (Les Illuminations VII: Lives)

In her series Space Craft, Kate Joyce photographs prisms in black-and-white transforming an optical tool designed to clarify vision and reveal the full spectrum of color into a grayscale confusion about what is being seen. Arranging anamorphic wedge prisms, and isosceles and equilateral triangle prisms into small groups that act on one another, Joyce creates scale-free micro-architectures of light.

Prisms are precision-crafted tools for use in ophthalmology, microscopy, and astronomy. They are widely used in telescopes, prescription lenses, and periscopes. During several Apollo lunar missions prisms were installed on the surface of the moon to help calculate the distance between Moon and Earth. These optical instruments measure and manipulate light with exacting specificity. In Joyce’s photographs their function transforms. In grayscale, refracted light and illumination take on qualities closer to shadow—but these are shadows without sources of occlusion. Shadows that behave like solids.

The glass and acrylic prisms used in Space Craft are named for their geometry, not materials or use. The word comes from the Greek prisma—”a geometrical prism, trilateral column” (Euclid). In geometry, a wedge, brick, keystone, and tile are all prisms. Architecture is made from prism-shapes. The etymological root of the word reveals that prisms are not only optical instruments but fundamental spatial forms, the building blocks from which constructed space emerges.

Having photographed architecture throughout her career, Joyce readily recognizes familiar patterns and forms from buildings. Through her camera the small optical prisms take on the solids, voids, and planes of the built world. The prism-objects appear monumental and of unknown scale. They allude to familiar architectural forms while the actual objects she is photographing become unfamiliar.

There is a prism inside the camera Joyce uses to photograph the prisms on her window sill. This recursive relationship of optical instrument photographing optical instrument becomes a lens for inquiring into photography’s oddly compressed relationship to space. In this way the images exist at distorted scale in fantastically unfamiliar spaces.

Space Craft follows two earlier bodies of work by Joyce that use photography to view familiar environments and objects in unfamiliar ways. Metaphysics (2022) is a study of sunlight illuminating passengers and airplane cabin interiors at the fluid interface of body and machine. Aporia (2006) is a study of food items and the orchestrated landscape of diner grills in constant flux between the raw and cooked.

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(Kate Joyce Space Craft Print Edition Information.pdf)

Space Craft
Archival pigment print
40 x 26.5 inches
101.6 x 67.31 cm
Framed: 41 x 27.5 x 2 inches
104.14 x 69.85 x 5.08 cm
Edition of 3
Signed and dated verso

*Variable sizes available upon request