Aperture's PhotoBook Review: Jesse Dorris on Mark McKnight
“What must surely be a split trunk of a tree beckons, orificial, a deep black that widens with attention like a pupil in the dark. As above, so below. The queer mystic John Balance once sang, ‘by working the soil, we cultivate the sky’…”
Read MorePaper Journal: Mark McKnight, Heaven is a Prison by Darren Campion
“It is the coding of McKnight’s images that is queer as much as their content, and the opening of spaces within a visual tradition for both his own desires and the notion of desire itself as a refusal of categories. This isn’t a matter of rewriting the tradition, but of rediscovering what was occluded within it.”
Read MoreNearest Truth: Episode 100, Mark McKnight
“Mark McKnight’s Heaven is a Prison defies all expectations and occupies an oblique imaginary space that feels like a testament to other simulations, worlds and ways of seeing that are un-manacled from the burden of photography’s predisposition towards white heteronormativity. It is also more than the sum of its parts.”
Read MoreLight Work + Loose Joints Present: Drew Sawyer (Brooklyn Museum) and Mark McKnight in Conversation
“Join us this Sunday 18 October for a live conversation between Mark McKnight and Drew Sawyer, photography curator at the Brooklyn Museum.
McKnight and Sawyer will be discussing the process and ideas behind Heaven is a Prison, Mark’s bold, immersive new book, while placing his approach to sex, landscape and the sublime in the context of his broader artistic practice.”
Koppe Astner @ Frieze London
October 7 – 16, 2020
works by:
Miguel Cardenas
Dickon Drury
Josh Faught
Kris Lemsalu
Mark McKnight
Leanne Ross
Read MoreWorking from Home: New Commissions @ Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson
October 4, 2020 - March 7, 2021
with:
Miguel Fernández de Castro
Nazafarin Lotfi
Mark McKnight
Nicole Miller
Rocki Swiderski
Read MoreGQ Magazine: The Pornographic High Art of Photographer Mark McKnight by Garth Greenwell
“By portraying explicit sex between men, he rejects the desexualization of queer bodies that has been the cost of mainstream acceptance in a culture that to a certain extent embraces same-sex marriage and parenting but recoils from the fact of men fucking each other. By centering bodies that are large, nonwhite, covered with hair, McKnight rejects standards of beauty that dominate both the straight and the queer worlds. And in presenting the scandal of queer abjection, McKnight complicates a too-easy, politically motivated discourse of queer optimism and pride that, as it becomes coercive, deformingly flattens the complexity of queer lives.”
Read MoreMark McKnight on K-CHUNG Radio (1630 AM) Los Angeles
Radio interview and mixtape, released on the occasion of the artist’s first monograph.
Read MoreAnOther Magazine: Inside a Sensual New Photo Book Capturing Lovers in the Californian Desert
“In sun-cast black and white images, two nude men surrender to desire amid a barren Southern Californian desert, which stretches as far as his lens captures.”
Read MoreBritish Journal of Photography: Sex as Meaning-making in the Work of Mark McKnight
“…transcendence is what burns through the pages of Mark McKnight‘s Heaven is a Prison — a poetic series of elegant black-and-white images depicting two men copulating amid the terrain of Southern California’s high desert. They are alone, and their forms fuse and rupture in moments of intimacy and domination.”
Read Morei-D / Vice Magazine: Mark McKnight Explores the Pain and Euphoria of Sex
“His new book shoulders a lot of the emotional weight of queer male sexuality. It’s two subjects, copulating in the long grass of a large open landscape, are strong and virile -- examining every detail of each other’s bodies -- but tender, and full of longing. Hands grasp flesh and fingers enter mouths, strands of saliva and thick metal chains tie one to the other even when they’re not being penetrated. As their entanglement progresses, few sexual acts are left unexplored.”
Read MoreInterview Magazine: Cleanness Author Garth Greenwell Interviews Mark McKnight About His Daring, Dirty Pictures.
“McKnight photographs sex—including sadomasochistic and fetishistic sex—in a way that complicates simplistic notions of pleasure and pain, dominance and submission. In their exploration of ambivalence, his images suggest a rich and nuanced—I want to say novelistic—approach to intimacy. The series makes up McKnight’s first photo book, Heaven is a Prison, which won the 2020 Light Work Photobook Award and is published this month by Loose Joints.”
Read MorePortfolio in Contact Sheet, Issue 207, Essay by Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez
“Instead of rendering and defining their subjects in particularity, the photographs flow with a haunting spirit. They remind me of the German expression Es spukt hier, which literally translates as ‘it haunts here.’ The phrase has no subject and does not define what the ‘it’ that ‘haunts’ is. Rather, as theologian Rudolf Otto describes in The Idea of the Holy (1923), the phrase is ‘simply the pure expression of the emotion of ‘eeriness’ or ‘uncanniness’ itself, when just on the point of detaching and disengaging from itself a first vaguely intimated idea of a numinous something, an entity from beyond the borders of natural experience.’”
Read MoreThe New Yorker: Mark McKnight and the Bodies That Modernist Photography Didn’t See
“His pictures—lush, formalist compositions mainly of nude men communing with nature (and sometimes with one another)—are hot with desire, the camera lingering hungrily over the mud-flecked ass of one subject, the gingerly held foot of another, or the spread-legged bodies of two men languidly fucking in a field of daisies. And yet, McKnight told me recently, his process principally consists of ‘standing at a distance and quietly observing things that I want to take part in.’ Self-anointed as a perpetual wallflower, McKnight has become keenly attuned to the frenzy of want that’s kicked up when, as he puts it, ‘unrequited desire becomes part of the desire itself.’”
Read MoreA Time for Monsters @ Fort Gansevoort
June 17 - July 1, 2020
with:
Felipe Baeza, Gisela McDaniel, Mark McKnight, Star Montana, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Fay Ray, Eduardo Sarabia, Ken Taylor, Kemang Wa Lehulere, Liat Yossifor
Curated by Cesar Garcia-Alvarez
Read MoreMark McKnight: Heaven is a Prison receives 2020 Light Work Photo Book Award
“We are pleased to announce, Los Angeles-based artist, Mark McKnight, is the recipient of the annual 2020 Light Work Photobook Award for his monograph, Heaven is a Prison. The book will be co-published this year by Loose Joints and Light Work. Light Work gives the Photobook Award annually to an artistic project that deserves international attention.”
Read MorePark View / Paul Soto Presents: Mark McKnight & Victoria Colmegna @ Gallery Platform
May 14 – 21, 2020
Participating galleries:
1301PE, Bel Ami, Jeffrey Deitch, Matthew Marks Gallery, Jenny’s, Park View/Paul Soto, Philip Martin Gallery, Various Small Fires, Vielmetter Los Angeles
Read MorePortfolio in BOMB Magazine, Issue #151, Spring 2020
“McKnight’s gaze is attuned to the transcendent but not inured to the politics of how bodies and lands are abused, policed, and degraded. His photographs look lovingly at stretch marks, scars, blotches, and burns, at marred landscapes and fleshly bodies in repose. They propose a counter to the history of erasure and violence that’s been visited upon bodies like his own, and they find a redemptive beauty in the land despite our breaches of the natural contract. The threat is not trivialized but rather put in context beside the main event: the alchemical feat of turning matter into light, which McKnight looks to as an emancipatory act.”
Read MoreReviewed in Art in America
“In its formal beauty, ambient horniness, and casual psychedelia, McKnight’s vision of rugged American landscapes is surpassed only by Georgia O’Keeffe’s.”
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