In Mark McKnight’s photographs, the material of the terrestrial world merges with a celestial aspect. Dark bodies, asphalt, oily birds, decomposing stone, and dimpled flesh all radiate from a field of tarry shadow. The literal darkness corresponds to a figurative one, a subtle intimation of the entropic path of matter—what McKnight calls, after Simone Weil, its “decreation”—into lower states of order. Yet the terms of this rebirth are distinctly non-hierarchical. Animate and inanimate matter mutually inscribe upon one another. His images propose a queer ecology that eschews the boundaries of a reductionist or essentialist biology and look, rather, at the ligaments—a stream of piss into water, the pucker of a cave’s opening—that bind the living and nonliving. The effect is to animate both his personal circle and inert matter with the revitalizing fecundity of mothering. Read More