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 a photographer from Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is the author of four books. "Metaphysics" (Hat & Beard Press, 2022) and “Big Ears Knoxville" (Hat & Beard Press, 2019). Under the artist’s own imprint, Joyce published “Metamorphoses” (Special Problems Press, 2021) and "Analogies" (Special Problems Press, 2023). Her photographs are in Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, Blau International, The Paris Review, Architect Magazine and housed in museum and library collections throughout the United States, among them the Art Institute of Chicago Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, Museum of New Mexico Palace of the Governors, North Carolina Museum of Art, and Center for Creative Photography. Joyce was artist-in-residence at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater in 2024-25 and is a resident artist at the Santa Fe Institute.

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.