September 10 - October 24, 2026

Opening Reception : September 10, 2026 6-8 pm

“What Armijo McKnight is doing is tying every landscape, every individual, every promise of God to the millstone of magnificent and sublime death.”

September 3 – October 25, 2025

With:
Sophie Friedman-Pappas, Mark Armijo McKnight, Na Mira, & John Sandroni

Alvaro Barrington, Pia Camil, Anne Collier, CAConrad, Ann Craven, Natalie Diaz, Carroll Dunham, rafa esparza, Nan Goldin, Mark Grotjahn, Wade Guyton, Lyle Ashton Harris, Roni Horn, Anne Imhof, Ryan McGinley, Mark Armijo McKnight, Jade Kuriki Olivo (Puppies Puppies), Grace Rosario Perkins, Richard Prince, Em Rooney, Tschabalala Self, Rudolf Stingel, Elaine Stocki, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Banks Violette, Charline von Heyl, and more..

Todd Cronan will moderate a conversation with the photographers Lyle Ashton Harris, Aspen Mays, and Mark Armijo McKnight about White’s impact and influence. The speakers will consider the history of Aperture as part of White’s legacy, as well as their personal connections to his work and career, from imagery and subject matter to philosophies about teaching and self-discovery. 

“This exhibition is accessible to the public free of charge as part of the Whitney Museum’s enduring commitment to supporting and showcasing emerging artists’ most recent work.”

“For his exhibition Decreation, Mark Armijo McKnight invited one of his favorite writers, T Fleischmann, to contribute a reflection on his work. A poet and essayist whose writing defies conventional genre boundaries—often blending memoir, criticism, and poetry into a singular, evocative voice—Fleischmann shares with Armijo McKnight an interest in exploring the intersections of landscape, identity, embodied experience, and the transformative power of art. In their second book, Time is the Thing a Body Moves Through (2019), Fleischmann crafts a poignant meditation on queer community, artistic creation, and the politics of embodiment, weaving together reflections on Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s art and their own personal experiences. The narrative unfolds in fragments, mirroring the fluidity of time and the body’s movement through it. Like their previous writings, Fleischmann’s response to Decreation calls attention to their embodied experience of the exhibition.”

—Drew Sawyer, Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography

The conversation will explore their shared interests, from the French philosopher Simone Weil’s writings on beauty to the ways their friendship has influenced their understandings of poetics, visual arts, opera, and more. The conversation is moderated by Drew Sawyer, Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Mark Armijo McKnight at The Whitney Museum of American Art, reviewed by Miller Schulman.

Johanna Fateman reviews Mark Armijo McKnight at The Whitney Museum of American Art

Mark McKnight, Decreation at Whitney Museum reviewed

Mark Armijo McKnight: Decreation features new and recent black-and-white photographs by Mark Armijo McKnight (b. 1984, Los Angeles, California; lives in New York, New York) and focuses on his ongoing body of work, “Decreation.” A new 16mm film in the gallery plays a cacophonous symphony of gradually unwinding metronomes set within the dramatic geological formations of the Bisti Badlands/De-Na-Zin Wilderness in New Mexico. Two large limestone sculptures, which double as seating, suggest the forms of a pair of ancient sundials.

August 24, 2024 - January 5, 2025

“Science writer William L. Fox traces connections between mythmaking and human cognition throughout history, while artists Sam Contis, Mark Armijo McKnight, and Raven Chacon discuss how their work counters and breaks these myths by reframing the protagonists and narratives we typically see enacted in the landscape.”

Featuring: William L. Fox, Mark Armijo McKnight, Sam Contis, Raven Chacon
Hosted by: Venus Williams

08 March-30 May 2024

With: Clarice Cliff, Guy de Cointet, Robert Cumming, Deondre Davis, Masahisa Fukase, Joe Gilmore, Luigi Ghirri, Daan van Golden, Jan Groover, Miyoko Ito, Suzanne Jackson, Mark Armijo McKnight, Bob Law, Siobhan Liddell, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Matt Paweski, Cora Pongracz, Kye Potter, Ryan Preciado, Patrick Prockter, Barbara T Smith, and Masaomi Yasunaga.

Published on the occasion of Posthume, at Paul Soto, Los Angeles and La Maison de Rendez-Vous, Brussels, Summer 2023.

“171 scientists, writers, scholars, and artists honored across 48 fields…”

With:

Daniel Gibson, Esteban Ramòn Pérez, Hilary Pecis, Kara Joslyn, Mark McKnight, Mario Ayala, Peter Shire, Ryan Preciado, Sayre Gomez, Tidawhitney Lek, and more.

an Interview by Silvi Naci.

Summer Issue, 2022.

Transcript forthcoming.

February 19 - April 23, 2022

With:

Felipe Baeza, Mark McKnight, Marcel Alcala, Fay Ray, Eduardo Sarabia, and more..

Includes work by Mark McKnight, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Deanna Dikeman, Rodrigo Valenzuela, Zanele Muholi, and more…

“The smell of the bones was unimaginable. I moved them from place to place: at first to my partners home and later my parents. These people love me, and in turn, I love these decaying objects to whom I feel similarly beholden. In the process, the bones accrued more psychic baggage and subsequently more meaning. The whole thing felt like a strange dream. I, who spent most of the pandemic without a home, found myself dragging these bones from place to place trying to find one for them.”

June 30, 2021

11am PST / 2pm EST

(Archived)

“Sun pounds thirsty ground. Two guys—bearish, without inhibitions, brown—fuck across several photographs in ‘‘Hunger for the Absolute’… McKnight’s photographs depict, in high-contrast black and white, moments of beatific calm in the midst of carnal frenzy.”

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.

“McKnight deftly harnesses standard metaphors — the tree as home to the spirit, sanctuary of the soul; the landscape as an unsullied Eden set against a fraught humanity — and turns them to his own ends… the frankly symbolic, formally attuned, ethereally abstract and potently political all merge in a suite of eight highly engaging photographs."

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

October 4, 2020 - March 7, 2021

with:

Miguel Fernández de Castro

Nazafarin Lotfi

Mark McKnight

Nicole Miller

Rocki Swiderski

“…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.”

“His new book shoulders a lot of the emotional weight of queer male sexuality. It’s two subjects, copulating in the long grass of a large open landscape, are strong and virile -- examining every detail of each other’s bodies -- but tender, and full of longing. Hands grasp flesh and fingers enter mouths, strands of saliva and thick metal chains tie one to the other even when they’re not being penetrated. As their entanglement progresses, few sexual acts are left unexplored.”

“His pictures—lush, formalist compositions mainly of nude men communing with nature (and sometimes with one another)—are hot with desire, the camera lingering hungrily over the mud-flecked ass of one subject, the gingerly held foot of another, or the spread-legged bodies of two men languidly fucking in a field of daisies. And yet, McKnight told me recently, his process principally consists of ‘standing at a distance and quietly observing things that I want to take part in.’ Self-anointed as a perpetual wallflower, McKnight has become keenly attuned to the frenzy of want that’s kicked up when, as he puts it, ‘unrequited desire becomes part of the desire itself.’”

“McKnight’s gaze is attuned to the transcendent but not inured to the politics of how bodies and lands are abused, policed, and degraded. His photographs look lovingly at stretch marks, scars, blotches, and burns, at marred landscapes and fleshly bodies in repose. They propose a counter to the history of erasure and violence that’s been visited upon bodies like his own, and they find a redemptive beauty in the land despite our breaches of the natural contract. The threat is not trivialized but rather put in context beside the main event: the alchemical feat of turning matter into light, which McKnight looks to as an emancipatory act.”

February 5 - March 7, 2020

with:

Nicolas Deshayes

Cayetano Ferrer

Mark McKnight

October 16 – 20, 2019

works by
Kate Spencer Stewart
Mark McKnight
Aidan Koch
Andy Giannakakis

With:

Victoria Colmegna, Andy Giannakakis, Aidan Koch, Mark McKnight, Dylan Mira, Alex Olson, Matt Paweski, Autumn Ramsey, Mark A. Rodriguez, Kate Spencer Stewart, J. Parker Valentine, & Willa Wasserman

“Mark McKnight’s black-and-white images of bodies and landscapes challenge Eurocentric ideas about male beauty—and aim to make ‘straight’ photography a little less straight...”

“194 photographs, 54 artists, 2 museums, 1 region. The simultaneous two-part exhibition at The California Museum of Photography and the Riverside Art Museum presents the work of groundbreaking photographers who for decades have used Inland Southern California as an tabula rasa laboratory for artistic experiment. The Inlandia Institute, the region’s premier literary organization, publishes the full 274-page exhibition catalogue.”

(Published on the occasion of Mark McKnight: Turn Into, James Harris Gallery, 2018)

“The truly queer creates meaning where there has previously been little, and while it actively flirts with the possibility, it absolutely does not allow itself to be understood. Sometimes context is its own excuse, and sometimes a seed can only arrive at fertile soil chambered within layers of tough thorn, protected and obscure."

June 23 - August 18, 2018

With:

Peter Holzhauer, Mark McKnight, Hannah Karsen, Mark A. Rodriguez

September 22 - October 28, 2017

With:

Amanda Alfieri, Nikki Darling, Alexis Disselkoen, Daniel Gibson, Rochelle Gomez, Gala Porras Kim, Mark McKnight, Mark A. Rodriguez, Conrad Ruiz

April 21, 2017

With:

Brody Albert, Math Bass, James Herman, Mark McKnight, Hannah Mjolsnes, Haynes Riley, Coral Saucedo, Noon Tran

September 11, 2016

With:

Sam Contis, Nikki Darling, Nicole Eisenman, Tony Feher, David Gilbert, Devin Kenny, Mark McKnight, Eileen Myles, John Purtle, Vincent Ramos, Guan Rong, Samantha Roth, Mark So, Cody Trepte, Rosha Yaghmai, Samira Yamin

Includes essay by grupa o.k. (Julian Myers and Joanna Szupinska)

October 30 - December 18, 2010

With:

Joshua Aster, Larry Bell, Michelle Blade, James Brittingham, Bruce High Quality, Juan Capistran, Kristin Calabrese, Alika Cooper, Sylvia Cooper, Daniel Desure, Mark Dutcher, Andrew Foster, Kevin Galleazi, Michael Hayden, Inner City Avant-Garde, Charles Karubian, Anthony Lepore, Sydney Littenberg, Mark McKnight, Samia Mirza, Emmeline De Mooij, Ariana Papademetropoulos, Marlon Rabenreither, Pj Risse, Malik Sayeed, Allison Schulnik, Natascha Snellman, Eric Yahnker and others.

Curated by Noah Davis

Published by Lay Flat, 2009

Included in Lay Flat 01: Remain in Light are essays by Tim Davis, Darius Himes, Cara Phillips and Eric William Carroll, an interview with Mike Mandel by Shane Lavalette and a poem by Jason Fulford, all accompanied by 20 unbound photographs from a selection of international photographers: Gustav Almestål, Richard Barnes, Coley Brown, Michel Campeau, Thobias Fäldt, Nicholas Haggard, Estelle Hanania, Nicolai Howalt & Trine Søndergaard, Whitney Hubbs, Hiroyo Kaneko, Nicola Kast, Anne Lass, Mark McKnight, Debora Mittelstaedt, Yann Orhan, Ed Panar, Shawn Records, Kamden Vencill, Andreas Weinand and Raimond Wouda.

“Queer Constellations: Photographs from the Aronowitz Family Collection is a sweeping exploration of identity and artistic lineage, presenting major photographs by and about queer artists. The exhibition celebrates a transformative gift of 50 photographs to CMA from the Columbus-based Aronowitz Family and significantly expands beyond it with an additional 100 works from the Aronowitz Family Collection.”

Hardcover with handmade paper housed in a box
36 pages, 14 tip-on plates
14.25 x 18.75 in. / 362 x 476.25 mm
Edition of 750, each signed and numbered
2025
ISBN 978-1-942953-74-6

“Their work meets in shared spaces: the erotic, the poetic, desire and restraint, silence and shadow; both illuminating queer lives with honesty and complexity.

What began as an assignment deepened into a deep, loving friendship, one that continues to reshape and expand their inner and outer worlds.”

Announcement and full artist list…

After the novelist Garth Greenwell was assigned to write about Mark Armijo McKnight’s photographs, the two men bonded over their shared themes of queer sex and intimacy.

“Capturing the movement of light and shadow with the subtle intensity of black-and-white film, McKnight delineates that photography is a form of magic, making him a magician of the queerest kind.”

“An accessible, inspirational, and engaging introductory survey of LGBTQIA+ photography, as told through the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.”

“In Decreation at the Whitney, Armijo McKnight mines Simone Weil’s neologism to evoke a sense of creation-through-eradication.”

Kat Herriman reviews Mark Armijo McKnight at The Whitney Museum.

Vince Aletti reviews Mark Armijo McKnight: Decreation at The Whitney Museum of American Art

Drew Sawyer, Sondra Gilman Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, interviews Mark Armijo McKnight on the occasion of his exhibition.

Artists: Felipe Baeza, Adi Blaustein Rejtö, Cameron, Ursula Reuter Christiansen, Dorothy Cross, Geoffrey Hendricks, Mark Armijo McKnight, Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya, Erin Jane Nelson, Sarah M. Rodriguez, Frederick Sommer, Willa Wasserman

Edited with introduction by Dan Leers. Foreword by Eric Crosby.

Published by Carnegie Museum of Art

ISBN: 9780880390743
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023945232

Designers: Geoff Han and Ben Schwartz
Editor: Michelle Piranio
Printed: Die Keure, Belgium

How has humanity’s relationship with the land been documented by, and altered through, photography? How has the ever-increasing pace of image-making changed the environment and human ecology? These are the driving questions of Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape, a publication inspired by a generation of contemporary artists who have endeavored to chart the past, present and potential futures of photography and the landscape.

Through a collection of essays, poetry and newly commissioned artwork, Widening the Lens aims to ignite renewed ecological awareness through visual representations of the environment that reveal underlying historical, social, geological and political processes. The publication includes an introduction by Dan Leers, curator of photography, Carnegie Museum of Art; an essay by renowned curator, writer and activist Lucy R. Lippard; a new commission from poet Saretta Morgan; and an epilogue by award-winning environmental and science journalist Michelle Nijhuis.

“Photography – A Queer History examines how photography has been used by artists to capture, create and expand the category ‘Queer’. It bookmarks different thematic concerns central to queer photography, forging unexpected connections to showcase the diverse ways the medium has been used to fashion queer identities and communities.”

With:

Mark McKnight

James Ensor

June 9 – July 22, 2023

Works by:

Mark McKnight

Kate Spencer Stewart

February 16 - 19, 2023

Booth G13

Regents Park

London

October 12-16, 2022

“Consider it. Consider consider. Etymologically, this once meant 'to observe the stars' (sidere). Considerate. Siderate means 'to blast or strike down'. Its Latin root siderari means 'to be struck by a star' or 'to be sunstruck'. 

There's a celestial root to desire too - desiderare - to long for, or await, what the stars might bring…”

Published on the occasion of Mark Armijo McKnight: Kiss of the Sun, Kendall Koppe Gallery, Glasgow.

With:

Kari Upson, Mark McKnight, Pau Pescador, Jim Isermann, Paul Sepuya, Aaron Garber-Maikovska, Andrea Zittel + more

With:

Laura Aldridge

Miguel Cardenas

Dickon Drury

Josh Faught

Mark McKnight

Leanne Ross

Includes Mark McKnight, Sara Cwynar, Roe Ethridge, Taryn Simon, Alec Soth, John Gossage, Stephanie Syujuco and many more…

“It's in this etherous affect of violence, of horror - removed from a strict concept of corpse - that both you and the algorithm respond to a tree. Not so different after all, husks of the dead, apophenic machines. There's more content to that Bernini-like grasping of flesh than the new church would allow.”

“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.”

Hunger for the Absolute at Park View / Paul Soto reviewed by Gracie Hadland for Frieze

“The seen and the unseen rub together with such potent friction that the smooth sheen of the photograph’s surface becomes a pool of water for a submerged world of intense contrasts more real than the one we see it from.”

“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.”

“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’…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Instead of rendering and defining their subjects in particularity, the photographs flow with a haunting spirit. They remind me of the German expression Es spukt hier, which literally translates as ‘it haunts here.’ The phrase has no subject and does not define what the ‘it’ that ‘haunts’ is. Rather, as theologian Rudolf Otto describes in The Idea of the Holy (1923), the phrase is ‘simply the pure expression of the emotion of ‘eeriness’ or ‘uncanniness’ itself, when just on the point of detaching and disengaging from itself a first vaguely intimated idea of a numinous something, an entity from beyond the borders of natural experience.’”

“We are pleased to announce, Los Angeles-based artist, Mark McKnight, is the recipient of the annual 2020 Light Work Photobook Award for his monograph, Heaven is a Prison. The book will be co-published this year by Loose Joints and Light Work. Light Work gives the Photobook Award annually to an artistic project that deserves international attention.”

“Los Angeles, CA—Rema Hort Mann Foundation is thrilled to announce the 2020 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Los Angeles Emerging Artist Grantees. The eight recipients of the Emerging Artist Grants are: Patrisse Cullors, Michelle Carla Handel, Sebastian Hernandez, Mark McKnight, Chinaedu Evelyn Nwadibia, Athena Quispe, Jazmin Urrea, Reed Van Brunschot.”

Aperture Foundation, New York

Monday, January 13

7:00 pm - 8:30 pm

“…although McKnight rejects so many of the usual sources of affect—facial expression, social context, identifiable narrative—his work is drenched in affect, supersaturated with emotion in a way that feels almost operatic, exuberantly queer.”

With:

Trenton Doyle Hancock, Naudline Pierre, Mark McKnight, Annie Lapin, Fay Ray, Michael Stamm, Cammie Staros, Summer Wheat

Organized by Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles

On newsstands across France July 23, 2019

Text by Ingrid Luquet-Gad, Aurélie Derhee.

March 2 - April 6, 2019

With:

Erica Deeman, Mark McKnight, Eva O’Leary, and Larry Sultan

“Even with no bodies in sight, Mark McKnight’s monochrome prints reveal a dedication to corporealness. Two evocative craters soak up shadows; rock formations swirl to suggest folds of skin. Meanwhile, McKnight, who’s showing for the first time in Seattle, obscures the topography of the male bodies in his photographs…”

September 6 - October 13, 2018

“Between brutally direct, seemingly ‘straight’ depictions of sun-drenched concrete, sand, and skin is a kind of poetry that signal the artist's human concerns. The pictures suggest time, desire, and deterioration but also they occupy a kind of interstice. Situated between the real and the surreal, direct representation and construed meaning, the terrestrial and the ethereal – the pictures illuminate the medium's broader poetic and transformative potentials as much as they point towards the specificity of the artist's subjective experience.”

Published on the occasion of Mark McKnight: …if water forgets how to play mirror, Queens, Los Angeles, 2018

September 2 - October 21, 2017

With:

Timothée Calame, Victoria Colmegna, Catharine Czudej, Oto Gillen, Sam Grossinger, Gypsy Sport, Paul Heyer, Megan Marrin, Mark McKnight, David Muenzer, Laura Owens, Bailey Scieszka, Heji Shin, Tom of Finland, Dena Yago, Dardan Zhegrova

An Art Sale to Benefit the ACLU

Saturday, January 21, 2017

http://356mission.com

"Veiled meanings and indeterminacy have characterized abstraction throughout history. Brenna Youngblood’s 'Two Can Win' (2013) and Mark McKnight’s 'Window #3' (2015) use painting and photography, respectively, to encode and uncover the surface of things. The former embeds objects into the color field, the vague appearance of a chainlink fence outlining a sense of place or displacement, while the latter captures how marks and gestures can break through the artifice and reveal the layers beneath."

July 11 - September 10, 2015

With:

Nayland Blake, Matthew Brandt, Phil Chang, John Divola, Jessica Eaton, Roe Ethridge, Frank Haines, Michael Henry Hayden, Whitney Hubbs, Farrah Karapetian, Dwyer Kilcollin, Henry Krinsky, Anthony Lepore, Mark McKnight, Bob Mizer, David Muenzer, Anthony Pearson, Matthew Porter, Alex Prager, Vanessa Prager, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Jon Rafman, Mariah Robertson, David Benjamin Sherry, Jesse Stecklow, Jeffrey Stuker, Hannah Whitaker

With:

Sayre Gomez, Mark McKnight, Michele O’Marah, Nora Jean Petersen, and Lisa Williamson.

Curated by Lia Trinka-Browner

Published by Bread & Butter Books, 2010

With: Ajit Chauhan, Nancy Lupo, Simmons & Burke, Paul Schiek, Calvin Trezise, Peter Hurley, Whitney Hubbs, and Ron Jude.

Organized by Mark McKnight

Filmed and edited by Nick Schiarizzi for TBW Books, 2026.

Music: Colin Stetson, Clothed in the Skin of the Dead

Shot at Green-Wood Cemetery, New York.

“This book presents new ways of approaching photographic discourse from a queer perspective, offering discussions on what a queering methodology for photography may entail…”

July 25 – August 24, 2025

With:

Rosario Aninat & Simon Shim-Sutcliffe, Henry Belden, Lenard Giller, Hardy Hill, Muyeong Kim, Sollee Kim, Mark Armijo Mcknight, Arthur Marie

The 2025 Aperture Portfolio Prize jury—Lucy Gallun, Noelle Flores Théard, Zack Hatfield, and Mark Armijo McKnight—selected five artists from more than one thousand submissions. At The Photography Show presented by AIPAD, Théard, Hatfield, and McKnight joined moderator Sarah Meister for a public conversation about the jury’s selection process and the year’s shortlist.

Opens February 26, 2025

With:

A.K. Burns, Chanell Stone, Cyprien Gaillard, David O. Alekhuogie, David Hartt, Dionne Lee, Edra Soto, Erin Jane Nelson, Fazal Sheikh, Justine Kurland, Lucy Raven, Mark Armijo McKnight, Melissa Catanese, Raven Chacon, Sam Contis, Sky Hopinka, Tomás Saraceno, Victoria Sambunaris, Xaviera Simmons

Join us as artists Mark McKnight and Elle Pérez discuss their practices encompassing the notion of landscape and the echoes of photographic history, and how these themes are perceived through a queer lens.

Artist Mark Armijo McKnight joins Rail contributor Ksenia M. Soboleva for a conversation.

“Is there something masochistic about art? I wondered this as I stood transfixed by the central film in Mark Armijo McKnight’s solo show at The Whitney.”

"...there has seldom been—and here I struggle to think of a proper antecedent—the type of vision that Mark Armijo McKnight’s photographs provide, where that very landscape is no longer called upon to signify our mastery over nature, and where instead it might still be the site of something elemental, primordial even—perhaps something beyond us entirely."

“The artist’s new exhibition at the Whitney Museum, which is organised by the museum curator Drew Sawyer, offers a succinct window into his contemplative suggestion of queering a landscape.”

“Mark’s pictures might be set at the end of the world, an end we sense ever more vertiginously approaching; if so, they assert that the end of the world is a place of human meaning, too, or of the search for it. They claim that we will keep meaning, keep searching for meaning, like his death’s-head pilgrims, upon the final scrap of land on the final shore at the final end of our world. And who knows, why not, somehow, maybe—(posthume)—after.”

June 27 – August 1, 2024

With:
Rinella Alfonso
Andy Giannakakis
Mark Armijo McKnight
Autumn Ramsey
John Sandroni
Kate Spencer Stewart

Opens May 11, 2024

With:

A.K. Burns, Chanell Stone, Cyprien Gaillard, David O. Alekhuogie, David Hartt, Dionne Lee, Edra Soto, Erin Jane Nelson, Fazal Sheikh, Justine Kurland, Lucy Raven, Mark Armijo McKnight, Melissa Catanese, Raven Chacon, Sam Contis, Sky Hopinka, Tomás Saraceno, Victoria Sambunaris, Xaviera Simmons

“Otto-Knapp and McKnight provide visual moments for linking the symbolism of an intellectual and animate interiority with the reality of the material surfaces and substances forming the world around and within us.”

Paul Soto is pleased to announce a two-venue exhibition of new photographs by Mark Armijo McKnight titled Posthume. The exhibition will take place across our Los Angeles location and Brussels annex, La Maison de Rendez-Vous….

Artists: Shannon Ebner, Cecilia Vicuña, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Demian DinéYazhi’, CAConrad, Félix González-Torres, Etel Adnan, Otis Houston Jr., The Song Cave, & Moyra Davey.

Organized by Mark Armijo McKnight

With:
Ash Arder, Mark McKnight, Daniel Arthur Mendoza, Manal Kara, Crystal Cortez, and Livien Yin. Curated by Aay Preston-Myint.

April 30 - May 28

Preview Friday, April 29, 2022, 5-8pm

The Debris of an Unknown Celebration is a 90-minute collection of music and poetry that revolve around blue, the color of the suspended cyanotypes that made up McKnight’s first museum commission, Light Falls at MoCA Tucson, 2021.

Emika Suzuki on Mark McKnight, Gustav Courbet, Noboyushi Araki, and more.

Issue #14, Summer 2021

On newsstands now

“The photographs delight in a visual investigation of the animal-sculptural qualities of the body without monumentalizing or rendering it an object… McKnight’s dense picture-making process a vulnerable, responsive, and revelatory approach to the figure-in-landscape.”

Mark McKnight, Hunger for the Absolute at Park View / Paul Soto named Frieze Top 5.

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

PDF forthcoming

October 7 – 16, 2020

works by:

Miguel Cardenas

Dickon Drury

Josh Faught

Kris Lemsalu

Mark McKnight

Leanne Ross

Radio interview and mixtape, released on the occasion of the artist’s first monograph.

“McKnight photographs sex—including sadomasochistic and fetishistic sex—in a way that complicates simplistic notions of pleasure and pain, dominance and submission. In their exploration of ambivalence, his images suggest a rich and nuanced—I want to say novelistic—approach to intimacy. The series makes up McKnight’s first photo book, Heaven is a Prison, which won the 2020 Light Work Photobook Award and is published this month by Loose Joints.”

June 17 - July 1, 2020

with:

Felipe Baeza, Gisela McDaniel, Mark McKnight, Star Montana, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Fay Ray, Eduardo Sarabia, Ken Taylor, Kemang Wa Lehulere, Liat Yossifor

Curated by Cesar Garcia-Alvarez

ISBN 978-1-912719-15-0

Available for pre-order

“In its formal beauty, ambient horniness, and casual psychedelia, McKnight’s vision of rugged American landscapes is surpassed only by Georgia O’Keeffe’s.”

Mark McKnight’s first solo show at the gallery will include five new large-format photographs taken throughout the Southwest. Landscapes and queer bodies appear in flux as McKnight blurs a multitude of formal and figurative boundaries: earth and flesh, self and subject, artist and documentarian.

Aperture Foundation
547 W 27th Street, Floor 4
New York, NY 10001

Opening Reception:
Friday, November 22, 7:00 – 8:30 p.m.

“The vast amount of flesh smeared on everything, our stores full of them, our faces spread at 10 meter heights. Everywhere; a hall of mirrors. As if Bernd and Hilla Becher had foretold of a, this, complete surveillance…. And our bodies become so extracted, mined, and repackaged, that we start to feel like we don't have bodies at all. And then here a photo of a body still surprising, that can endear us to it, these weird incongruous things not yet fully extracted.”

Recorded in: Los Angeles, California
Episode Length: 43:30
Air Date: April 30, 2019

Produced by: Jordan Weitzman
Edited by: Cristal Duhaime

January 26th - February 23rd, 2019

“Roger’s Office presents an exhibition of works by Mark McKnight and Paul Pescador in which the artists reciprocally employ one another as the subject of their work in order to investigate their relationship not only to each other but also their respective creative practices…”

“‘Queering’ – a term that came out of queer theory in the 1980s and 1990s to challenge heterosexuality as the societal standard – has branched out, addressing a range of oppositional forces in art, literature, and beyond. Mark McKnight’s Turn Into, six immaculately printed black-and-white photographs at Seattle’s James Harris Gallery through October 13, expands on this discussion to reconsider the concept of “normality” with an aesthetically and conceptually poetic twist.” (read on…)

August 2 - 5, 2018

James Harris Gallery (Booth C09)

with: Viola Frey, Ed Ruscha, Alexander Kroll, Mark McKnight, Evan Nesbit, and others.

“For Queens' third exhibition, Mark McKnight offers a selection of artworks that reflect his ongoing engagement with the craft and materials of “traditional” black and white photography. Through careful use of the fundamental tools of his medium—framing, composition, use of light and shadow—he produces an embellished reality through bleak, darkly printed photographs that foreground his subjective, existential, and poetic concerns.”

October 22, 2016

With:

Brice Bischoff, Greg Curtis, Mark McKnight, Nora Shields, Itza Vilaboy

Curated by Lia Trinka-Browner

October 4 - November 15, 2015

With:

Eduardo Consuegra, Lecia Dole-Recio, E.J. Hill, Pearl C. Hsiung, Lee Maida, Amanda McGough, Mark McKnight, Amir Nikravan, Anna Sew Hoy and Brenna Youngblood

Curated by Paul Pescador

September 14 - October 19, 2013

With:

Gil Blank, Walead Beshty, Whitney Hubbs, Dwyer Kilcolin, Mark McKnight, Matt Siegle, James Welling

Curated by Lisa Ohlweiler

Published by Seems, 2010

Published by TV Books, 2008

Edited + introduction by Tim Barber

300 Pages

11"x8.5"

OUT OF PRINT