Maria Antelman & Mark Armijo McKnight

October 28th - January 26th 2024

Maria Antelman Mark Armijo McKnight

Maria Antelman (b. 1971, Athens, Greece) is an artist working with photography, sculpture, sound and animation. She approaches technological progress from a feminine perspective, reevaluating our connection to mother-nature, our historical past, technology and the Self. Recently her works have been presented at Melk in Olso, Foreland in Catskill, Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (New Photography 2020), the Visual Art Center in the University of Texas in Austin, at the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) in Athens and at the Bemis Center in Omaha NE. She has been an artist in residence at Silver Arts Projects at the World Trade Center, at Pioneer Works and the International Studio & Curatorial Program, all in New York City. Antelman holds an MFA in New Genres from Columbia University and a BA in Art History from the Complutense University in Madrid. She lives and works in New York and in Athens.

view Maria's full biography

On behalf of Maria, Outer Space will donate 5% of its profits from any sales of her work to Kimball Jenkins.

In this quickly changing technological world, we constantly need to negotiate our relationship with memory, identity, physical body, society and similar technicalities. Absorbed in an endless digital present, we live connected to networks that flatten the experience of time.

As we become extensions of the technologies we use, our tools change us and change the way we respond to the world. These subtle, yet deep transformations, routed in the complicated systems that machines weave around us, are my main concerns. My practice portrays a collection of failed attempts of the ingenious human spirit to control chaos, find a purpose immersed in an information overflow, decode undecipherable codes, recover from erroneous processes and failed visionary ideas. Misconceptions about the past and the future as well as new and old technologies are a continuous source of inspiration. Each of my artworks is an attempt to find a sense of wholeness and purpose in an ever changing, cold systematic world.

Mark Armijo McKnight (b. 1984 Los Angeles, CA) is an artist whose work has exhibited internationally. His work has been written about in the Los Angeles Times, Interview, The New Yorker, GQ Magazine, Aperture, Art in America, Frieze, ArtForum, Brooklyn Rail, Mousse and BOMB Magazine, among others. 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. His work is in the collection of The Henry Art Gallery (Seattle, WA) the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA) and The Getty Museum (Los Angeles, CA). His first monograph, Heaven is a Prison, was published in September 2020. In Winter 2022, Armijo McKnight opened a curatorial project at Vielmetter (Los Angeles). Past solo exhibitions include Paul Soto (Los Angeles, CA), La Maison de Rendez-Vous (Brussels), June 2023, Kendall Koppe, (Glasgow, Scotland), 2022, and Klaus von Nichtssagend, (New York, NY) 2021.

Armijo McKnight is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and Assistant Professor of Expanded Photography at Rutgers University. His second monograph, Posthume, is forthcoming (TBW Books, Oakland, CA, 2024).

Outer Space would like to thank Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery and Paul Soto Gallery for their support with this exhibition.

view his full biography

On behalf of Mark, Outer Space will donate 5% of its profits from any sales of his work to Reach LA

Mark Armijo McKnight makes photographs that explore new possibilities for how to picture queer subjecthood. The artist expands upon the history of 20th Century photography, in particular the American Landscape tradition. Shooting primarily in the high desert of his Southern California youth, Armijo McKnight works with site as a stage and a presence unto itself, animating the landscape and his subjects in existential, psychological, and spiritual ways.