The Brooklyn Rail

The American West has been photographed so extensively and for so long that to say our collective idea of it is inseparable from those images, or that, for those who have never been there, that landscape is an image, seems less an exaggeration than an acknowledgement of historical circumstance. What that image has often shown us, at least the one that has been created through photography, has been nature seen and understood, controlled even, before then being remade in our image and by our processes of industry, commerce, and habitation. The American West has been both subject and reflection; it has been the ground upon which the American settler-colonial project has unfolded, and also, crucially, an idea (of limitlessness, of the frontier, of conquest) that has been exhausted without necessarily disappearing. Though there have been many pictures that show at least one side of the American West just described, there has seldom been—and here I struggle to think of a proper antecedent—the type of vision that Mark Armijo McKnight’s photographs provide, where that very landscape is no longer called upon to signify our mastery over nature, and where instead it might still be the site of something elemental, primordial even—perhaps something beyond us entirely.

This is but a fraction of what McKnight allows us to contemplate in Decreation, an exhibition somehow sparse and expansive in equal measure, and one which signals a dramatic expansion of his art beyond the boundaries of photography. Those familiar with McKnight’s work will be on familiar ground, but only just, as his photographs are accompanied by two limestone sculptures and a 16mm film eleven minutes long. Though the materials are heterogeneous, the works themselves, and their metaphoric registers, are closely intertwined.

The exhibition is staged in the Lobby gallery on the ground floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art, a single room which is free and open to the public. Though he has much to contend with in the museum’s lobby, McKnight asserts his own aural and temporal control, as the steady clicking of the metronomes— at times maddening and at others beautiful and overwhelming—in Without a Song (solo ii) (2024) effectively ruptures our connection to where we have just been. Projected to fill an entire wall, such that the grain of the film stock seems present and alive, the film sets a rhythm for the room that you cannot deviate from. Beginning with clouds passing over a white sun, the first and only cut introduces a metronome shot in close up. The film, in a literal sense, is about the steady addition of clicking metronomes—each at their own tempo—that gradually wind down as the frame slowly zooms out to show the group of them (I counted a dozen or more) arranged throughout a cavernous geological formation. Though the clicking is relentless, once one adjusts and begins to hear it as a kind of music, then the more subtle, ambient sounds from the landscape can be heard thrumming in the background.

The two limestone sculptures that comprise Duet (2024) are placed in the center of the room and double as functional seating in front of the film. Elegantly imperfect and cool to the touch, they are incised with carvings on top that are meant to invoke a “mass” dial, a medieval form of time measurement that was used to indicate the start of church services for the day. McKnight’s invocation of an older form of spiritual activity or religious ritual encourages us to suspend our drive to interpret and decode. McKnight uses the sonic chorus of the metronomes and the immovable permanence of the limestone slabs to recalibrate our sense of time and space—to estrange us from ourselves—so that a room which first felt like a kind of delirium ends up feeling closer to purification instead.

The rich monochromatic quality of the film should come as no surprise to those previously acquainted with McKnight’s photographs: blacks that are absolute and whites that seem seared into place exist at either end of the tonal range, with the vast zone between them comprised of a complex gradient of gray, lead, and charcoal. His silver gelatin prints reassert this chromatic reality, doing so unencumbered by reflection of any kind as McKnight displays them framed but without glass. This is a subtle but crucial detail that allows them to remain legible from across the room, so that nothing complicates our absorption of their materiality.

Somnia (2024) shows three masculine bodies lying curled together in a patch of grass strewn about with rocks and stones, while stretching off into the distance behind them is yet more of this rocky terrain. A distant chain of mountains completes the frame, pressing against what little sky remains. Their union in that coarse landscape is without reason or greater context; they seem joined together out of some necessity neither they nor we can ascertain. Next to them is The Black Place (ii) (2024), a picture that expresses McKnight’s full capacity for seeing the body in the landscape and the landscape as a body. The bodies in Somnia—their overlapping limbs and folds of skin—are transfigured here into ripples of desert rock that stretch back through the barren yet sensual landscape to a place we cannot see.

Anti-Mater (2023) shows a female body lying in a field flowering with daisies while lost in a self-pleasuring act, with one hand between their legs and the other arm draped over their eyes. If we were to read this primarily as an image of abundance and stimulation, or as one of vitality, we would miss the inverse meaning McKnight encourages us to see. Though the body is alone and absorbed in reverie, it is not separate and apart from the landscape it is nestled in. The insects that have begun to crawl upon the body at just this moment remind us of the conceptual, as well as practical, folly of believing that total separation, or objective distance, between subject and world can be had or maintained. Likewise, it is crucial we see and think of a “body” rather than a fully-fledged subject, since what McKnight is trying to show us, or to literalize through form, are attempts at moving beyond the self, or at “decreating” it entirely, which is to say undoing it. Just as the bodies in Somnia were left to be seen as such because each face remained hidden, so too in Anti-Mater does the obscured face work to refuse our attempt to project our own subjectivity onto it, and instead to see the whole scene as some kind of container for a larger and more expansive meaning. This heuristic approach is further encouraged by Ez Ozel (or: Father Figure) (2023), in which the skeletal remains of an animal sit relief-like in an otherwise empty field of grass, bluntly suggesting a final stage in the undoing of the self. 

McKnight’s interest in different forms of, and strategies for, moving beyond the self is not new in his work. While previously it may have been couched within explicit yet tender acts of sexual connection, now it is less physically specific or consistent: the thematic container is less clearly defined, though the works themselves are no less potent because of it. He has managed to push his imagery into a space of myth and timelessness, as though all that came before and all that is still yet to come had been frozen by the release of his shutter.