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…”
Read MoreBOMB 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.”
Read MoreFrieze: Mark McKnight Photographs Hardcore Vistas
Hunger for the Absolute at Park View / Paul Soto reviewed by Gracie Hadland for Frieze
Read MoreMark 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.”
Read MoreFrieze: Top 5 Exhibitions to See in the US and Canada
Mark McKnight, Hunger for the Absolute at Park View / Paul Soto named Frieze Top 5.
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreHunger 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.”
Read MoreVanity Fair: Introducing the Inaugural Silver List, Featuring 47 Exciting Contemporary Photographers Whose Work You Just Have to See
“The Silver List aims to do for photography what the Black List did for screenwriters, bringing broader recognition to the most exciting up-and-coming talents in their field.”
Read MoreHunger 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.”
Read More1000 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.”
Read MoreAperture'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.”
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