Mark Mcknight | Bodyfold, 2018 (Via Aperture Foundation)
Mark McKnight (born in Los Angeles, 1984) was born to a New Mexican mother who struggled with their Southwestern, diasporic roots. In turn, McKnight grappled with reconciling his own identity, both as a mixed-race person of color and as a gay man—particularly one who neither exemplified nor desired the idealized, Eurocentric cultural standard of male beauty that is perpetuated even within gay culture. Since McKnight was raised in an environment that privileges white, heterosexual masculinity, his work operates as a site of resistance to those values. McKnight completed a Fulbright Scholarship in Finland in 2009, and he has also completed artist residencies at Storm King Art Center (2017) and Light Work (2019). In 2018 McKnight gave the first in a series of public lectures titled “Queer Eye,” in which he confronted the shortsighted legacy of “straight,” modernist photographic practice while proposing a queered historical revision; that same year he held two solo exhibitions that received favorable national reviews. His work was the subject of both a two-person gallery exhibition at Roger’s Office in Los Angeles and a multi-museum survey and catalogue. His most recent group exhibition, Close to Home (Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, 2019), dealt with the themes of identity and abstract narrative. His work is currently represented by James Harris, Seattle.
