“Swallow” is not your ordinary photographic portrait of a tree, which has been a common subject for artists almost from the 19th century start of camera work. Instead of intrinsic majesty within — or over — nature, Mark McKnight turns the tradition into something vaguely ominous and worrying.
The large, black-and-white gelatin silver print in his debut solo exhibition at Park View/Paul Soto gallery shows what appears to be a mighty oak in all its sturdy, leafy, natural splendor, standing grandly at the top of a rise in an open landscape. Yet, surprisingly, fully one-quarter of the image is obscured by a sensuous black swipe of deep shadow across the field, running from the bottom left edge all the way to the right.
The tree stands poised to be engulfed by encroaching darkness — swallowed up and consumed. Flooding the lower register, the shadow emerges from where the viewer stands, as if we are already engulfed by it. Maybe we are the metaphorical source of the shade, projecting darkness into a vision of a tree that is just a remote aspiration. Formally, the dark, velvety smear pulls a viewer close to peer into the scene to see what, if anything, is going on beneath the lowered limbs of the sheltering tree.McKnight deftly harnesses standard metaphors — the tree as home to the spirit, sanctuary of the soul; the landscape as an unsullied Eden set against a fraught humanity — and turns them to his own ends.
McKnight has titled the exhibition “Hunger for the Absolute,” borrowed from the book “The Metaphysical Dog,” a collection by revered American poet. The photographer is 36; the poet, 81. The choice suggests generational passage and autobiographical specificity: Both artists are Southern California born, went to school at UC Riverside, identify as gay or queer, and focus their work on subjective intersections of the spirit and the flesh.
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