Artdaily_NEW YORK, NY.- Mark McKnight’s first solo show at the gallery includes 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.

Mark McKnight (b. Los Angeles, CA) holds a BFA from the San Francisco Institute of Art, and an MFA from the University of California Riverside. His work has previously exhibited in several group exhibitions and catalogs of photography including 20/20 Vision: An International Photography Biennial and Defining Photographs & Radical Experiments in Inland Southern California, 1950 – Present (California Museum of Photography, Riverside, 2019). Recent solo exhibitions include if water forgets how to play mirror (Queens, Los Angeles, 2018) and Turn Into (James Harris, Seattle, 2018). In 2017, he was an artist in residence at The Shandaken Project at Storm King Art Center. In 2019, McKnight was selected as a Light Work A.I.R. and was the winner of the 2019 Aperture Portfolio Prize. A solo show of his work is currently on view at the Aperture Gallery in New York through January 15.

How do I meet the gaze of another matter-machine?

There and here borders cut between different ways of being
a life form. I, with my silhouette: without becoming a tree
I dare to rest here beneath the tree. This endless faith in rims,
edges, cutting points and the loyalty of objects. With an
endless trust in the silhouettes, in that the straps and
cuts, the stitches will hold things in place.

Out of a trust in matter.