The Whitney Museum presents the first museum exhibition of American photographer Mark Armijo McKnight, for a plunge into desolate landscapes at the convergence of the human body, desire and mysticism.

Mark Armijo McKnight is known for his black-and-white images of nudes and landscapes that draw on a long history of photography in the American West. This Los Angeles native, now based in New York, has exhibited his work in several galleries, but this marks his first time exhibiting in a museum. The Whitney Museum of American Art presents "Decreation," a series of large-format silver gelatin prints he has been working on since 2018. The exhibition's title references Simone Weil's (1909-1943) concept of mystical philosophy, whose theories describe an act of self-effacement in order to open oneself to and connect with a divine power.

METAPHYSICAL REFLECTIONS

Mark Armijo McKnight explores this thought process in images of bodies and landscapes, immersed in intermediate states. Nude figures entwined engage in an approach of erotic games, questioning art history, ancient mythology, social philosophy, embodiment, and even time.
The 40-year-old artist overlays metaphors onto his photographs, while exploring the various tensions between his subjects and his technical choices, which amplify contrasts and chiaroscuro. All these otherworldly scenes were taken in the California desert, where he grew up, and the badlands of New Mexico (also known as the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness), his mother's homeland.
"Its dramatic terrain has often been used to symbolize sublime beauty and an ideal of freedom from society, even though its imagery has been exploited for violently oppressive purposes," explains curator and photography conservator Drew Sawyer.

BETWEEN POETRY AND ABSTRACTION

Mark Armijo McKnight's images display the formal precision associated with modernism, in the lineage of avant-garde artists who made landscape a fertile ground for abstraction, such as Georgia O'Keeffe. Caught in their contradictions, they evoke "tumult and tranquility, darkness and light, isolation and conviviality."
The photographs are accompanied by a 16mm film featuring György Ligeti's Symphonic Poem (1962), a composition for one hundred metronomes. These moving images form the heart of the exhibition, where sound sets the tempo throughout the space. Two limestone sculptures, shaped like ancient sundials and which can be used as seats, complete the installation.
“The unprecedented ecological and socio-political upheavals of our time have profoundly impacted my psyche and, consequently, my practice,” explains Mark Armijo McKnight in the museum’s press release. “I feel a sense of urgency to create and share this work because it is, in its own way, both a reflection of and a response to the tumultuous world we find ourselves in… and I also hope it offers a place to find catharsis or solace.”

“MARK ARMIJO MCKNIGHT: DECREATION”
99 GANSEVOORT STREET, NEW YORK (USA)
UNTIL JANUARY 12, 2025
WHITNEY.ORG