i-D / Vice Magazine: Mark McKnight Explores the Pain and Euphoria of Sex

i-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.”

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Mark McKnight
Interview Magazine: Cleanness Author Garth Greenwell Interviews Mark McKnight About His Daring, Dirty Pictures.

Interview 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.”

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Mark McKnight
Portfolio in Contact Sheet, Issue 207, Essay by Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez

Portfolio 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.’”

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Mark McKnight
The New Yorker: Mark McKnight and the Bodies that Modernist Photography Didn't See.

The 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.’”

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Mark McKnight
Mark McKnight: Heaven is a Prison receives 2020 Light Work Photo Book Award

Mark 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.”

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Mark McKnight
PARK VIEW / PAUL SOTO @ Gallery Platform

Park 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

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Mark McKnight
Mark McKnight, BOMB Magazine, Issue #151, Spring 2020, Essay by Nich Hance McElroy

Portfolio 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.”

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Mark McKnight
Reviewed in Art in America

Reviewed 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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Mark McKnight
In this temporarily prevailing landscape @ Klaus von Nichtssagend

In this temporarily prevailing landscape @ Klaus von Nichtssagend, New York

January 10 - February 16, 2020

Mark McKnight’s first solo show at the gallery will include five new large-format photographs taken throughout the Southwest. Landscapes and queer bodies appear in flux as McKnight blurs a multitude of formal and figurative boundaries: earth and flesh, self and subject, artist and documentarian.

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Mark McKnight
Garth Greenwell on Mark McKnight, Aperture 2019

Garth Greenwell on Mark McKnight, Aperture 2019

“…although McKnight rejects so many of the usual sources of affect—facial expression, social context, identifiable narrative—his work is drenched in affect, supersaturated with emotion in a way that feels almost operatic, exuberantly queer.”

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Mark McKnight
The Procession: Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles @ VACATION, New York

The Procession @ VACATION, New York

“The exhibition features new and recent works by Trenton Doyle Hancock, Annie Lapin, Mark McKnight, Naudline Pierre, Fay Ray, Michael Stamm, Cammie Staros, and Summer Wheat. The exhibition title refers to a group of individuals moving as a collective body—often in celebration—to a common destination. Works within the exhibition address many of the prevalent themes found within the gallery’s program. The exploration of personal narrative, art history, and the body are used as a means to better understand our social, political, and cultural moment.”

With:

Trenton Doyle Hancock, Naudline Pierre, Mark McKnight, Annie Lapin, Fay Ray, Michael Stamm, Cammie Staros, Summer Wheat

Organized by Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles

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Mark McKnight
Contemporary Art Writing Daily, Mark McKnight in Automatic Door, Park View / Paul Soto

Contemporary Art Writing Daily. Mark McKnight in Automatic Door, Park View / Paul Soto.

“The vast amount of flesh smeared on everything, our stores full of them, our faces spread at 10 meter heights. Everywhere; a hall of mirrors. As if Bernd and Hilla Becher had foretold of a, this, complete surveillance…. And our bodies become so extracted, mined, and repackaged, that we start to feel like we don't have bodies at all. And then here a photo of a body still surprising, that can endear us to it, these weird incongruous things not yet fully extracted.”

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Mark McKnight
Automatic Door @ Park View / Paul Soto

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

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Mark McKnight