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	11 Sep 2020 www.loosejoints.biz Instagram / Twitter  /  Facebook

Mark McKnight, Heaven is a Prison

a queer exploration of intimacy within the austere
terrain of Southern California’s high desert

Heaven is a Prison is a striking and immersive new body of work by American artist Mark McKnight and the recipient of this year's Light Work Photobook Award. 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. 
 

"McKnight photographs sex—including sadomasochistic and fetishistic sex—
in a way that complicates simplistic notions of pleasure and pain, dominance
and submission. In their exploration of ambivalence, his images suggest a rich
and nuanced—I want to say novelistic—approach to intimacy."

— Garth Greenwell

 

Limited silkscreen fundraising edition

We have teamed up with Mark and Reach LA to produce a unique silkscreen print edition to accompany Heaven is a Prison. Each large-format 18x22" silkscreen is hand-printed by the artist, with deliberate interventions and modifications made to the image within the screenprinting process. As a result, each print is unique and contains a variable, intentional amount of imperfection. Signed by the artist in an edition of 200 copies.

Sales of this silkscreen edition support Reach LA's visual arts program. Reach LA provides a safe space for queer POC youth, young adults and their allies, offering creative opportunities, access to care, HIV testing, and more.