Automatic Door @ Park View / Paul Soto, Los Angeles
August 7 – 30, 2019
“Instead of meaning or identity, I would like to create and support poetry and I would like to create and support poetry that is spiritual. This is the most radical position for me to inhabit I have come to realize. I want my heart to operate like an Automatic Door, opening as I sense your approach, letting everything in and remaining with that experience as time passes and my body decays..”
With:
Victoria Colmegna, Andy Giannakakis, Aidan Koch, Mark McKnight, Dylan Mira, Alex Olson, Matt Paweski, Autumn Ramsey, Mark A. Rodriguez, Kate Spencer Stewart, J. Parker Valentine, & Willa Wasserman
“Mark McKnight’s black-and-white images of bodies and landscapes challenge Eurocentric ideas about male beauty—and aim to make ‘straight’ photography a little less straight...”
“Shulamit Nazarian is proud to present, Close to Home, a group exhibition of four photographers that mine their personal experiences–past and present–to express moments of intimacy within larger social and political structures. Engaging with the deep and complicated history of photographic portraiture, each artist renders his or her subjects in part as extensions of themselves, coded with personal and cultural references.”
With:
Erica Deeman, Mark McKnight, Eva O’Leary, and Larry Sultan
Shadow and Shadow of Shadow @ Roger’s Office, Los Angeles
January 26th - February 23rd, 2019
“Roger’s Office presents an exhibition of works by Mark McKnight and Paul Pescador in which the artists reciprocally employ one another as the subject of their work in order to investigate their relationship not only to each other but also their respective creative practices…”
Inlandia Institute publishes "In the Sunshine of Neglect: Defining Photographs & Radical Experiments.... 1950 - Present"
194 photographs, 54 artists, 2 museums, 1 region. The simultaneous two-part exhibition at The California Museum of Photography and the Riverside Art Museum presents the work of groundbreaking photographers who for decades have used Inland Southern California as an tabula rasa laboratory for artistic experiment. The Inlandia Institute, the region’s premier literary organization, publishes the full 274-page exhibition catalogue.
In the Sunshine of Neglect: Defining Photographs & Radical Experiments… 1950 - Present @ California Museum of Photography
January 19, 2019 - April 28, 2019
With:
Ansel Adams, Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Laurie Brown, Judy Chicago, Joe Deal, John Divola, Christina Fernandez, Judy Fiskin, Robbert Flick, Anthony Hernandez, Richard Misrach, Mark McKnight, Allan Sekula, Julius Shulman, Joel Sternfeld, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Larry Sultan among others.
“Even with no bodies in sight, Mark McKnight’s monochrome prints reveal a dedication to corporealness. Two evocative craters soak up shadows; rock formations swirl to suggest folds of skin. Meanwhile, McKnight, who’s showing for the first time in Seattle, obscures the topography of the male bodies in his photographs… (read on)”
“‘Queering’ – a term that came out of queer theory in the 1980s and 1990s to challenge heterosexuality as the societal standard – has branched out, addressing a range of oppositional forces in art, literature, and beyond. Mark McKnight’s Turn Into, six immaculately printed black-and-white photographs at Seattle’s James Harris Gallery through October 13, expands on this discussion to reconsider the concept of “normality” with an aesthetically and conceptually poetic twist.” (read on…)
“Every year Light Work invites between twelve and fifteen artists to come to Syracuse to devote one month to creative projects. Over 400 artists have participated in Light Work’s Artist-in-Residence Program, and many of them have gone on to achieve international acclaim.”
Object Permanence: Andrew Cameron on Mark McKnight
(Published on the occasion of Mark McKnight: Turn Into, James Harris Gallery, 2018)
“The truly queer creates meaning where there has previously been little, and while it actively flirts with the possibility, it absolutely does not allow itself to be understood. Sometimes context is its own excuse, and sometimes a seed can only arrive at fertile soil chambered within layers of tough thorn, protected and obscure."
“Between brutally direct, seemingly ‘straight’ depictions of sun-drenched concrete, sand, and skin is a kind of poetry that signal the artist's human concerns. The pictures suggest time, desire, and deterioration but also they occupy a kind of interstice. Situated between the real and the surreal, direct representation and construed meaning, the terrestrial and the ethereal – the pictures illuminate the medium's broader poetic and transformative potentials as much as they point towards the specificity of the artist's subjective experience.”
(Published on the occasion of Mark McKnight: …if water forgets how to play mirror, Queens, Los Angeles, 2018)
“All good work seeks to re-orient us from a place in which we stand assured in our knowing. How is it then that we un-know in order to understand what we are truly looking at? What did Mark see for twenty-seven years when he looked in the mirror? What did he remove in order to see himself?”
...if water forgets how to play mirror @ QUEENS LA
February 24 - April 1, 2018
“For Queens' third exhibition, Mark McKnight offers a selection of artworks that reflect his ongoing engagement with the craft and materials of “traditional” black and white photography. Through careful use of the fundamental tools of his medium—framing, composition, use of light and shadow—he produces an embellished reality through bleak, darkly printed photographs that foreground his subjective, existential, and poetic concerns.”
Timothée Calame, Victoria Colmegna, Catharine Czudej, Oto Gillen, Sam Grossinger, Gypsy Sport, Paul Heyer, Megan Marrin, Mark McKnight, David Muenzer, Laura Owens, Bailey Scieszka, Heji Shin, Tom of Finland, Dena Yago, Dardan Zhegrova
The Shandaken Project has announced the artists selected for its 2017 residency program, hosted for the third year at Storm King Art Center in upstate New York. A total of 19 artists, the largest group selected for the program to date...