Meet Mark McKnight

Today we’d like to introduce you to Mark McKnight.

Every artist has a unique story. Can you briefly walk us through yours?
I was born and raised in the high desert periphery of Los Angeles; I think my close proximity to the culture in Los Angeles proper and also the sense of boredom I felt being on the geographical margins of it (not to mention the sense of isolation that was compounded by being young, brown, and gay in a predominantly conservative, white area) were instrumental in making me who I am today. Art was life-saving! It gave me license and agency that I don’t think I would have found otherwise.

I was introduced to photography via a high school photography class where we learned to print black and white pictures in the dark room. I have been working with photography ever since. After high school, I attended a community college in Santa Clarita (College of the Canyons), received a scholarship and transferred to the San Francisco Art Institute, and was later a Fulbright Scholar. Shortly after completing my Fulbright (and before returning to LA for graduate school) I lived in Las Vegas where I taught college photography. I attended UC Riverside from 2012-2015 and received a Master’s degree in Fine Art. I’m officially a California kid. Never leaving.

Please tell us about your art.
I make photographs using a large format view camera; it looks like an antique to most people but it’s not! I am currently making most of my prints in the darkroom because I like the aesthetic quality of the gelatin silver paper as well as the meditative/cathartic experience of printing them. I tend to favor inexpedient processes that require a degree of labor. Printing in the darkroom is time-consuming but it also offers me an opportunity to slow-down and self reflect. Through the process of printing them, I understand my often unconscious motivations and in this way, the pictures are revelatory. Producing pictures is a way of making meaning in/of the world as well as understanding and coming to terms with myself and my experiences. I make the photographs somewhat intuitively and the subjects are varied; members of my community, found objects, and landscapes. Through installation, I draw formal and figurative relationships between seemingly incongruous subjects. I am attracted to the poetic potentials of photography and use editing, sequencing, and arrangement to foreground that.

Given everything that is going on in the world today, do you think the role of artists has changed? How do local, national or international events and issues affect your art?
I’m so grateful that being an artist is too broad and indefinable for me to prescribe roles for anybody. I can only speak for myself and say that my work is the amalgamated result of my experiences; that includes but is not limited to cultural climate, geography, international events, and so on. I should mention that I am a big believer in the unconscious and the subjective. Whether we acknowledge it or not, I think we are always responding to the particular time in which we live.

How or where can people see your work? How can people support your work?
Artist Paul Pescador and I have a two-person show up at a gallery called Roger’s Office in Highland Park through the end of February. I am in a survey of photography, “Defining Photographs and Radical Experiments, 1950 – Present” at The California Museum of Photography through the end of April. I have work at Photo LA, a photography fair that opens in a week in Santa Monica. In March, I am in a group show titled “Close to Home” at a gallery called Shulamit Nazarian. My website: http://www.markmcknight.xyz

Contact Info:

• Website: markmcknight.xyz

Image Credit:
Nikki Darling

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