"How might a photographer committed, in his own words, to 'decidedly unmediated descriptions of real world phenomena,' and to 'making work in and of the world,' register the abstraction of the current urban landscape? If one historical task of photography was to register the physical being, and being-together, of things in space, how might it register a contemporary space that has stopped making sense?
In Objects and Actions of Consequence (2015), Mark McKnight pictures the accumulating scars of an aging American urbanism, in which contemporary economic austerity has resulted in a surreal piling-up of provisional fixes and removals. He pictures broken street lamps, glue left behind when a sign is removed, and lathing scratched away in search of windows, revealing dead ends. He discovers in these artifacts a sort of demotic abstraction. These gestures are visible to the eye but were not intended for view.
The series Removal, for example, documents a worker’s splodges of adhesive to a brick wall. Through the photographer’s lens, these marks—dots, lines, and commas—appear diagrammatic or paralinguistic while also referring to certain threads of modernist painting (itself concerned with mapping out a disrupted city-space). In Separation, McKnight attends to a poorly-resolved corner where freeway overpass meets sidewalk meets curb; the sutures of this space have come loose, and cracks already traverse the hastily mixed new pavement.
The impenetrability of McKnight’s compositions is heightened by the full use of his medium from framing through printing, rendering these pictures spatially ambiguous and flat. The abstraction of urban space becomes the abstraction of pictures.
— grupa o.k. (Julian Myers and Joanna Szupinska)"
Mark Armijo McKnight (b. Los Angeles, CA) is an artist whose work has been exhibited internationally and written about in The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, Interview, GQ, Aperture, Art in America, Frieze, Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, Mousse, and BOMB, among others. His work is held in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, ICA Miami, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Henry Art Gallery, and the Columbus Museum of Art.
His first monograph, Heaven Is a Prison, was published in 2020, followed by Posthume, published by TBW Books in 2025. Armijo McKnight is a Fulbright Scholar and the recipient of the 2019 Aperture Portfolio Prize, the 2020 Light Work Photo Book Award, a 2020 Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant, and a 2023–24 Guggenheim Fellowship.
He is Assistant Professor of Expanded Photography at Rutgers University.
Represented by Klaus von Nichtssagend (New York)
Posthume (2025) published by TBW Books
Heaven is a Prison (2020) published by Loose Joints