Verbal Description: Somnia, 2023

Narrator: Somnia is a 4 feet high by 5 feet wide photo that pictures three friends of the artist, who are posed nude in a tangle of an embrace, lying horizontally in a rocky desert landscape. Although Armijo McKnight’s sitters are often Latinx, the ethnicities of the men in Somnia are left ambiguous to the viewer. They are portrayed in varying shades of grey: from the deep shadows that outline their limbs, to the rich dark grey and almost-white of their bare skin. They lie in the bottom third of the composition, closest to the viewer. Their faces are each turned downward, hidden, so the texture of their intertwined bodies is the predominant focus. The figure closest to us grips his hair as if in agony or ecstasy, and the sun gleams off the skin of his right shoulder and side. Around his belly and his upper arm, there are hands reaching, holding him tight, making small dark canyons in his muscles. Upon inspection, one limb is coming from the third, farthest back figure, but the tangle of arms and legs works to confuse where one body ends and another begins. The second figure, who is sandwiched in the middle, has darker skin than the first. His arm is adorned with small, lighter skin discolorations, a detail the silver gelatin print depicts in crisp textured clarity. Similarly, the hairs on the third figure’s arms and legs are legible, as are the bare twigs and soft dirt below them. 

Mark Armijo McKnight: I think there is deliberately an implication that they're in the realm of the erotic, but of course we don't actually see that. Something that's really important about this photograph also is, it speaks to something larger in my practice that I am very interested in, which is depicting, especially queer subjects, engaged in various forms of intimacy. This picture was made in a landscape that I know well, that I've made many photographs in that is not far from where I grew up.

Narrator: Behind the three men, maybe twenty feet in the distance, a mound of large rocks mimics the figures clasped together. It stands in three round shapes covered in smaller cracks. If the figures depict a kind of queer intimacy, the visual cadence offered by the rocks seems to underscore this intimacy’s place in the natural world. 

Mark Armijo McKnight: I think there's something, for me, that is really redemptive about describing this beauty and also doing it in a classical way in this landscape because it suggests that this sex and this intimacy belong to nature, that they, like so many figures throughout art history mostly describing heterosexual sex, deserve just as much to be a part of the canon. 

Also, salt and peppered around this landscape are all of these differently sized stones, some of which have clearly fallen off from a much larger stone that looks almost monumental or something. I've photographed in this location so many times that rock always feels monolithic.

Narrator: The smaller stones blanket the dark ground taking up most of the picture around the figures and larger rocks. The earth underneath them stretches back, going on and on. The horizon cuts a sliver out of the top left part of the frame, revealing a clear stretch of sky behind snow-capped mountains.