“It is about simple awareness — awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: ‘This is water, this is water.” It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.”

- David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

The Pit is proud to present Moonglow Metanoia, Kevin Umaña’s first solo in his hometown of Los Angeles. In this exhibition, Umaña confronts his complex relationship with the city that shaped his youth. Coming out of the fog and looking back to marvel at the shape of the cloud, Umaña offers a meditation on distance and perspective. The exhibition will be on view from November 1 - December 20, 2025, with an opening reception on Saturday, November 1, from 5-7 pm.

Born in Los Angeles and spending his early years in El Salvador before returning around age five, Umaña’s personal history has profoundly shaped his visual language. In El Salvador, he was immersed in a rural environment rich with natural textures, vibrant flora, and traditional crafts. Returning to Los Angeles, he confronted the intensity of city life and the pressures of assimilation. This duality seeded the fragmented forms and layered symbolism that define his art today. His practice continues to carry echoes of Latin American patterns, nature’s geometry, and American architectural influences, all reimagined through abstraction. His time contending with two cultures, two parents, two sets of dreams, and above all, his aspirations for himself, is embedded in the very surfaces of his works, where fractured memories coexist as integral parts of the final form.

Umaña’s artistic methodology reflects both discipline and surrender. Trained as a painter, Umaña later turned to ceramics, embracing the medium’s unpredictability. His process is rooted in careful preparation—sketching, measuring, and structuring compositions—while also welcoming improvisation and chance. Clay, with its memory of touch and vulnerability to fracture, mirrors his experience of impermanence and transformation that guide his work. He favors earthenware and stoneware that record every mark, and often pushes glazes beyond conventional use. Pouring, globbing, or spraying these glazes onto slabs means each kiln opening is both a risk and a revelation. In his “hybrid paintings”, on view in the exhibition, Umaña embeds ceramic fragments within surfaces layered with varied materials—acrylics, oils, marble dust, sand—building textures that oscillate between precision and organic irregularity. Moonglow Metanoia situates Umana’s practice within the context of Los Angeles. The show is a meditation on the city’s light and atmosphere, specifically the haze and smog that both obscure and enhance its landscapes. Growing up in Los Angeles, Umaña recalls mornings and evenings where pollution and particulate matter shaped the sky into bands of orange, purple, and pink—reminders that something negative can produce something beautiful. This memory serves as a metaphor for perspective: distance and time alter perception, just as leaving Los Angeles allowed him to see his hometown anew. “By backing away, I was able to see it all in a new light. This show is a return with a new perspective,” says Umaña.

The exhibition orients itself around the cycle of a single day—dawn, daylight, dusk, and night—exploring how light and shadow transform depending on vantage point. Umaña creates a rhythm of works that move between darkness and radiance, mirroring both the highs and lows of life in the city. The title draws inspiration from a quintessential Los Angeles moment: driving through Pasadena, listening to Benny Goodman’s “Moonglow,” and watching the glow of light refract through smog. This experience, at once ordinary and transcendent, crystallizes Umaña’s realization that Los Angeles can be seen anew if one shifts position, even slightly—whether on the highway, in the mountains, or simply through the passage of time. Moonglow Metanoia is not a love letter nor is it a diatribe; it is something more nuanced, a recognition born of hardship, a valuation born of resistance.