Mark McKnight for This Long Century

Mark McKnight for This Long Century

“The smell of the bones was unimaginable. I moved them from place to place: at first to my partners home and later my parents. These people love me, and in turn, I love these decaying objects to whom I feel similarly beholden. In the process, the bones accrued more psychic baggage and subsequently more meaning. The whole thing felt like a strange dream. I, who spent most of the pandemic without a home, found myself dragging these bones from place to place trying to find one for them.”

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Mark McKnight
ArtForum, Andy Campbell on Mark McKnight

ArtForum, Andy Campbell on Mark McKnight

“Sun pounds thirsty ground. Two guys—bearish, without inhibitions, brown—fuck across several photographs in ‘‘Hunger for the Absolute’… McKnight’s photographs depict, in high-contrast black and white, moments of beatific calm in the midst of carnal frenzy.”

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Mark McKnight
Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight Reviews Mark McKnight: Hunger for the Absolute at Park View / Paul Soto

Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight reviews Mark McKnight: Hunger for the Absolute at Park View / Paul Soto

“McKnight deftly harnesses standard metaphors — the tree as home to the spirit, sanctuary of the soul; the landscape as an unsullied Eden set against a fraught humanity — and turns them to his own ends… the frankly symbolic, formally attuned, ethereally abstract and potently political all merge in a suite of eight highly engaging photographs."

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Mark McKnight
Contemporary Art Daily + Contemporary Art Writing Daily

Contemporary Art Daily + Contemporary Art Writing Daily

“It's in this etherous affect of violence, of horror - removed from a strict concept of corpse - that both you and the algorithm respond to a tree. Not so different after all, husks of the dead, apophenic machines. There's more content to that Bernini-like grasping of flesh than the new church would allow.”

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Mark McKnight
Brooklyn Rail: Hunger for the Absolute at Klaus von Nichtssagend reviewed by Zach Ritter

Brooklyn Rail: Hunger for the Absolute at Klaus von Nichtssagend reviewed by Zach Ritter

“Drawn almost entirely from his remarkable monograph Heaven Is a Prison (2020), the photographs in Hunger for the Absolute dramatically expand, and forcefully concentrate, McKnight’s previous explorations of the landscape as a transmogrified space of sexual resonance and desire…”

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Mark McKnight
BOMB Magazine: Liberating the Taxonomic, Mark McKnight Reviewed by Steven Warwick

BOMB Magazine: Liberating the Taxonomic, Mark McKnight Reviewed by Steven Warwick

“For McKnight, the desert becomes a site of ontological possibility and utopic fantasy at odds with the reality of the artist’s experience growing up there, and his depictions of physical restraint suggest metaphysical bondage to allegorical ends… he offers an imagined, metaphoric site of freedom that is coupled with images of unoccupied, otherworldly landscapes: a sober reminder that such ‘safety’ continues to remain elusive.”

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Mark McKnight
Mark McKnight on Frederick Sommer, a Conversation with Audrey Sands, March 22, 2021 @ Center for Creative Photography

Mark McKnight on Frederick Sommer, a Conversation with Audrey Sands, March 22, 2021 @ Center for Creative Photography

“McKnight and Sands will discuss the legacy of acclaimed twentieth-century photographer Frederick Sommer and McKnight’s long-standing interest in Sommer’s life and work. The conversation will look at works by both artists and explore a range of overlapping themes and intersections, including: landscape, influence, education, the erotics of formalism, surrealism, sexuality, and the body.”

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Mark McKnight
The Debris of an Unknown Celebration, March 18, 2021 @ Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson

The Debris of an Unknown Celebration, March 18, 2021 @ Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson

In this audio performance, artist Mark McKnight shares The Debris of an Unknown Celebration, a mixtape exploring the color of his suspended cyanotypes in MOCA’s Working from Home exhibition. Become immersed in readings and songs—and encounter the inspiration behind McKnight's work.

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Mark McKnight
Hunger for the Absolute @ Klaus von Nichtssagend, New York

Hunger for the Absolute @ Klaus von Nichtssagend, New York

“Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery is pleased to announce Hunger for the Absolute, the gallery’s second exhibition by Los Angeles-based photographer Mark McKnight. The exhibition comprises new gelatin silver prints hung in both rooms of the gallery, and will run from February 26 through April 3.”

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Mark McKnight
Hunger for the Absolute @ Park View / Paul Soto, Los Angeles

Hunger for the Absolute @ Park View / Paul Soto, Los Angeles

“Park View / Paul Soto are proud to announce Hunger for the Absolute, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based photographer Mark McKnight. This is the artist’s debut with the gallery following our announcement of his representation last May. Hunger for the Absolute opens on Tuesday, February 2 and runs through late April.”

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Mark McKnight
1000 Words Magazine: Mark McKnight, Heaven is a Prison by Eugénie Shinkle

1000 Words Magazine: Mark McKnight, Heaven is a Prison by Eugénie Shinkle

“It’s in his images of landscape that McKnight’s much-vaunted debt to photographic Modernism is most clearly felt: Frederick Sommer, Minor White, Ansel Adams – each put their own distinct spin on the Modernist archetype, and each has left a trace on McKnight’s practice. For Adams especially, the landscape was a theatrical space on which to stage the heroic expression of the self. Through his views – their classical structure bound to the Western landscape tradition – the rational gaze dominates space. McKnight’s landscapes hint at this ideal form, except for the fact that the horizon – the eye’s guarantee of detachment – is nearly always absent. For the viewer, this refusal of distance plays out as a kind of vulnerability: I can’t see, I can’t know, I can’t find myself.”

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Mark McKnight