The Pit is pleased to present No Neighbors, Street Lights Are Out, Nick Kramer’s second one-person exhibition at the gallery. An opening reception will be held on March 4 from 4-7pm, and the exhibition will be on view through April 15, 2018.

Like a stage direction in a Samuel Beckett play, the title of Nick Kramer’s new exhibition at The Pit evokes both melancholy and possibility. Imagining a part of the city where he might carve out a new workspace, Kramer took a cue from speculative fiction to conjure a fictional zone on the edge of an everytown: a place with no neighbors, where only moonlight illuminates the night. Perpetually unnoticed or altogether abandoned, this part of town could be on the brink of gentrification or could be a vision of a future in which a series of natural disasters caused by climate change forced humans to flee or perish, leaving nature to run wild.

No Neighbors, Street Lights Are Out includes new sculptures, low reliefs, and black and white photographs that explore ideas about urban peripheries, the sometimes fuzzy distinction between what is natural and what is made, and the concept of permanence. Arranged as an exhibition of distinct objects that coalesce into a scene, the gallery is transformed into an abstract model of an imagined landscape. Based on Kramer’s observations of Los Angeles en route between home, studio, foundry, hardware store, and back again, these new works are rooted in Kramer’s real world experience of his community and environment but draw on the formal and associative properties of materials as well as the latent potential of metaphor to hint at a broader narrative that flirts with dystopia.

Nick Kramer was born in New York, NY in 1979 and lives in Los Angeles, CA. He earned a BA at Bard College, Annondale-on-Hudson, NY (2001) and a MFA at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA (2008). Kramer’s work has been featured in thematic exhibitions such as Ours Is A City of Writers, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2017); On Forgery: Is One Thing Better Than Another?, LA><ART, Los Angeles, CA (2011); Chinese Takeout, Art In General, New York, NY (2011); and Air Pressure, Glendale College Art Gallery, Glendale, CA (2010). He has curated numerous exhibitions such as Mushroom Honey House, metropcs, Los Angeles, CA (2016)and Mushrooms & Honey, Either Way LA, Los Angeles, CA, and he is the co-founder of AWHRHWAR, a project space in Los Angeles. Kramer is the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artists Grant (2016) and the California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2012), and he was awarded the Leon Levy Foundation Grant as a fellow at the MacDowell Colony (2010).