Mark McKnight’s Heaven is a Prison explores intimacy with and within the austere terrain of Southern California’s high desert. Published by Loose Joints in September 2020, the book describes a queer otherworld that is at once utopic and purgatorial, occupied by a solitary pair of copulating, Sisyphean protagonists who appear both liberated and bound by their intimacies and the severe expanse in which they are depicted. The volume runs 132 pages with 60 tritone plates, measures 250 × 305 mm, and appears as a silkscreened hardcover hand-wrapped inside printed paper, with text by Garth Greenwell, editing by Sarah Chaplin Espenon, and design and publication by Loose Joints.
Divided into chapters, the poetic sequences 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 toward transcendence, bondage, beauty, and abjection, while revealing them as two sides of the same coin.
Heaven is a Prison received the 2020 Light Work Photobook Award, given annually to an artistic project that deserves international attention. 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 at the Aperture Foundation in 2020 and in this temporarily prevailing landscape at Klaus von Nichtssagend, also 2020. He 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, and is represented by Klaus von Nichtssagend, New York and Park View/Paul Soto, Los Angeles.
A unique silkscreen print edition is also available. A bundle offer pairs the book with the accompanying silkscreen print and an exclusive cassette mixtape by Mark McKnight: each cassette is an hour-long soundtrack to the book and is an edition of 100. Free shipping is offered worldwide. Related material includes a conversation between Mark McKnight and Drew Sawyer on Instagram Live on 18 October 2020, a narrated video flipthrough by Loose Joints, and Nearest Truth #100.
