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Mark Armijo McKnight

Mark Armijo McKnight’s work expands the traditions of his photographic predecessors: shooting in the landscape of Southern California, New Mexico and Arizona with a formalist eye towards the textures and patterns of rock, sky, water and grasses.  The bodies in his photographs are representative of friends and acquaintances, a mostly queer community largely absent from the photographic histories he engages. Through careful printing, arrangement and installation, McKnight draws formal and figurative parallels that speak to the ways in which a geography both inscribes upon and is inscribed by our histories, traumas, intimacies, and subjectivities. The photographs describe queer intimacy with and within a landscape queerly registered and reconsidered: in terms of the mythopoetic, the sexual and the psychological.

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Award

Mark Armijo McKnight Awarded 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship

The Board of Trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded Mark Armijo McKnight a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship for his achievement and potential in the field of photography.

Outside Exhibition

Mark Armijo McKnight Show at Paul Soto Gallery

Mark Armijo McKnight is presenting new work in Posthume, a two-part exhibition at Paul Soto Gallery. The exhibition updates the memento mori art historical motif by imbuing it with ambiguity and connecting it to celebrations of the Día de Muertos. The first half of the exhibition is a solo show at Paul Soto's Los Angeles gallery and is up June 3 through July 22, 2023. The second half juxtaposes McKnight's work with drawings by the modern Belgian artist James Ensor and will be on view at Paul Soto's Brussels location June 9 through July 22, 2023.

Press

Mark McKnight and the Bodies that Modernist Photography Didn't See

A photo essay with writing by Chris Wiley was published in The New Yorker online on June 15, 2020.

interview

Mark McKnight on Frederick Sommer, a Conversation with Audrey Sands

McKnight and Sands discuss the legacy of acclaimed twentieth-century photographer Frederick Sommer and McKnight’s long-standing interest in Sommer’s life and work.

Interveiw

Mark Armijo McKnight in conversation with Garth Greenwell at Aperture

Aperture Foundation, in collaboration with Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, presented a conversation between acclaimed writer Garth Greenwell and photographer Mark Armijo McKnight, winner of the 2019 Aperture Portfolio Prize. Greenwell and McKnight spoke about the mystery and beauty of rendering queer life in words and photographs.
Mark McKnight Bodyfold, 2019

Acquisition

LACMA acquires Mark McKnight's Photographs

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has acquired of Bodyfold, 2019 and Destructive Distillation (Tar Cosmos), 2019.

Review

Photographer Mark McKnight Turns Queer Bodies Into Abstract Landscapes

Harry Tafoya reviews Mark McKnight's shows at Aperture and Klaus von Nichtssagend in Art In America, March 2020 issue.

Review

Mark McKnight: Park View / Paul Soto

Andy Campbell reviewed Hunger for the Absolute, Mark McKnights's solo show at Park View / Paul Soto in Los Angeles.

Review

Mark McKnight’s Exuberant Tribute to Queer Tenderness

Novelist and poet Garth Greenwell writes on Mark McKnights photographs in the December 2019 Issue of Aperture.

Review

Mark McKnight: Hunger for the Absolute

Zach Ritter reviews Mark McKnight's solo show at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, in the Brooklyn Rail, March 2021 issue.

Review

Liberating the Taxonomic

Steven Warwick reviewed Hunger for the Absolute, Mark McKnights solo show at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery and Park View / Paul Soto in the March 2020 issue of Bomb Magazine

Outside Exhibition

Mark McKnight at the Riverside Art Museum

Mark McKnight has photographs included in Defining Photographs and Radical Experiments in Inland Southern California, 1950 to Present, at the California Museum of Photography & Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA.