The Pit is pleased to announce Earth Canal, a solo exhibition of new sculptures by Joshua Tree, CA–based artist Ryan Schneider, his second with the gallery. This body of work continues the artist’s ongoing exploration begun in Last Human Teachers, his European institutional debut currently on view at La Citadelle – Centre d’art & Musée, Villefranche-sur-Mer, France through November 23, 2025. Earth Canal will be on view at The Pit, Los Angeles from November 1 through December 20, 2025 with a public opening reception on Saturday November 1 from 5-7pm.

The exhibition title Earth Canal plays on the idea of the “birth canal,” reflecting humanity’s painful, collective passage through a transformative moment. Carved from redwood and stone, cast in bronze, and occasionally adorned with gold leaf, Schneider’s works are at once primordial and contemporary, evoking the timeless presence of ancient idols while resonating with today’s cultural anxieties. Rooted in the physical act of carving, burning, and polishing, these sculptures radiate physical energy, carrying the mark of their making and the elemental forces that shaped them.

Schneider’s practice is deeply informed by early civilizations—from Indigenous petroglyphs and prehistoric monoliths to Mesopotamian statuary—traditions in which art functioned as both spiritual offering and communal record. By channeling these sources, alongside the desert landscape of the California desert where he lives and works, Schneider creates primitive forms that stand as both relics and reminders of what it means to be human. “I am thinking a lot about the experience of purely being human- and how that experience could soon be erased as AI worms into our consciousness, thinking processes, and bodies,” he notes. “In that sense, everyone alive at this moment could carry that sacred knowledge of “human beingness” into the future and pass it on to the next generations.”

The forms that emerge from this process are steeped in the sculptural veins of Brancusi, Max Ernst, Germaine Richier, Miro, Cocteau, and Louise Bourgeois—artists whose works he studied in person during a three-month residency in France. While his approach is resolutely intuitive and self-taught, specific works are inspired by artists and archeological artifacts he’s encountered in his research. Terra Amata, a stone head carved of Mexican Onyx, specifically references an archaeological site in Nice, France dated to 380,000 BC. Others like Interbeing, a towering, fluid figure, carved of Redwood and painted in bright cobalt and gold leaf, manifests divine feminine and masculine energies to form something new.

His sculptures embody transformation not only in their formal qualities but also in process: fire blackens wood into resilient surfaces, echoing purification rituals, while stone and bronze extend these forms into enduring monuments. The result is a body of work that connects the primordial with the present, urging viewers to in Schneider’s words, “Get quiet, feel the earth beneath you, look within, allow the sculptures to speak to you.” Each work bridges earth, body, and spirit—an invitation to reconsider our place in the continuum of history and our fragile future as inheritors, and teachers, of human knowledge.