The desert has long been a site for the imagination. It has biblical connotations of temptation and wandering, and when applied to California, it gains a nuanced specificity. California’s shift from 1960s counterculture to Silicon Valley cyberculture proposes a place where one can reengineer oneself. It is where Steve Jobs dropped acid, which was later echoed by his tech-world progeny at Burning Man festivals. Returning to the chaparral of his adolescence, Mark McKnight has spent his adult life photographing human figures in the high desert of Southern California. In his current bicoastal exhibition, Hunger for the Absolute at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery in New York City and Park View/Paul Soto in Los Angeles, male figures engage in corporeal, erotic play within a desolate landscape. Their bodies coexist in an environment that is both unforgiving and flourishing. The exhibition, whose title is culled from a poem by Frank Bidart, revels in a sensual overload amid a search for meaning. The photographs alternate between various close-ups of the body and expansive, formal landscape images. These disparate visual strategies result in blurring the lines between human figures and natural environments, transporting the viewer into a psychic landscape of McKnight’s own making. Read More