It could be no other way. Or at least, in Mark McKnight’s photographs made in the high desert in Southern California, that is how it seems. 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. With the company and collaboration of two friends, Nehemias de León and Christopher Barraza (named in the book but not in the exhibition), whose bodies structure the work both in their presence and their absence, McKnight has crafted a tender and hypnotic vision of romantic union through the joy of transgressive sex. Set against the luminous and austerely rendered desert landscape, his subjects piss and spit, dominate and submit—they eat ass and saunter through dappled shade. Read More