Heaven is a Prison
Mark McKnight
Co-published by Loose Joints and Light Work.
Text by Garth Greenwell.
Hardcover
First Edition
134 pages
250 × 305 mm
2019
ISBN 9781912719150
Heaven is a Prison by Mark McKnight is an exploration of intimacy with and within the austere terrain of Southern California’s high desert.
In Heaven is a Prison, McKnight describes a queer otherworld that is at once utopic and purgatorial – occupied by a solitary pair of copulating, Sisyphean protagonists that appear both liberated and bound by their intimacies and the severe expanse in which they are depicted.
Divided into chapters, the poetic sequences in this book oscillate between the literal and the figurative, between distance and communion, and between violence and affection. Claustrophobic, horizonless landscapes are coupled with images of ethereal clouds and tangled bodies that are simultaneously sculptural, shrewd, and tender.
Through his synonymous description of landscape and body, McKnight suggests metaphor, pointing at both as vehicles – towards transcendence, bondage, beauty, and abjection – while also revealing them as two sides of the same coin. Heaven is a Prison is the recipient of the 2020 Light Work Photobook Award, given annually to an artistic project that deserves international attention.
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About the Artist
Mark McKnight is a Los Angeles-based artist who has exhibited and published work throughout the United States and in Europe. Recent solo exhibitions include Mark McKnight (Aperture Foundation, 2020) and in this temporarily prevailing landscape (Klaus von Nichtssagend, 2020). Mark is the recipient of the 2019 Aperture Portfolio Prize, the 2020 Light Work Photo Book Award, and a 2020 Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant. He is currently represented by Klaus von Nichtssagend, New York and Park View/Paul Soto, Los Angeles.
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About the Publisher
Loose Joints is an award-winning independent publishing house based in London, UK and Marseille, France, founded by Sarah Piegay Espenon and Lewis Chaplin in 2014. They collaborate with leading and emerging artists on contemporary approaches to photography in book form. Loose Joints circulates new visual perspectives through a dedicated list seeking to elevate underrepresented voices in photographic discourse.
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Light Work was founded as an artist-run, non-profit organization in 1973. Its mission is to provide direct support through residencies, publications, exhibitions, a community-access digital lab facility, and other related projects to emerging and under-represented artists working in the media of photography and digital imaging.
lightwork.org
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