Kyle Knodell: Heavy Woods

Exhibition Dates: 

May 2 - June 20, 2026

Opening Reception: 

Saturday, May 2, 2026, 5-8 pm

839 is pleased to announce Heavy Woods, the first Los Angeles solo exhibition of Berlin-based photographer Kyle Knodell. Shot in Bushwick, Brooklyn, between 2010 and 2020, the photographs in this show track a decade of material and social transformation. The exhibition title draws on the neighborhood’s etymology: “Bushwick,” an anglicized form of the Dutch “Boswijck,” often translated as “town in the woods.” Originally part of Lenapehoking Territory, the area underwent cycles of settlement, industrialization, divestment, and, more recently, accelerated gentrification. Knodell’s images distill these long arcs into precise observations of surface, light, and the built environment.

Though these photographs do not depict people directly, their traces (vacancies, barriers, cleared land) gesture toward the social dynamics beneath these material changes, including the racialized patterns of displacement that have shaped recent redevelopment in Brooklyn. Working in a tradition that includes Eugène Atget, Berenice Abbott, and Aaron Siskind, Knodell approaches the city as both a documentarian and a formalist, with poetic photographs that resist spectacle but instead capture subtle disruptions. The artist interprets his surroundings through images that depict texture, shadow, and the arrangement of spaces and things.

Onderdonk Ave (2018), a vertical image, shows a cherry blossom tree and an array of white and pale pink flower petals overtaking a deserted sidewalk. Behind it, a shuttered storefront carries a high-contrast red-and-white sign reading “STORE FOR RENT.” Two boarded windows flank the metal gate. A black wrought-iron fence runs the length of the building, echoing the horizontal stretch of power lines that cut across the tree. The building’s facade is washed in shadows cast by the tree’s branches. What might otherwise be a pastoral spring moment becomes a study in tension: organic abundance (the tree obscures and reveals), commercial vacancy, and the infrastructural grids that organize urban space.

A pair of images: View from 26 Cedar St 1 (2012) and View from 26 Cedar St 2 (2013), documents the transformation of a Bushwick roofline as seen from an apartment window. In the first, an empty lot is delineated from nearby residential buildings by a wooden fence and tangles of tree branches in the foreground. In the second, the branches have been cleared, a rooftop refinished on one of the buildings, and in the distance, a new beige apartment block rises from where the lot had been. Sticker peels cling to its window panes, and uniform inset lighting marks the newly finished units. Rather than expressing nostalgia for the lot, the images point to how even a seemingly modest redevelopment recalibrates the real estate profile of the block; shifting the assumptions planners, developers, and new arrivals make about what the neighborhood is and what it can bear.

Found In Cedar House, a 2012 close-up of a glass painter’s palette, offers a vantage on labor and materiality. Smears of red, green, and burnt umber cling to the surface, traces of an unknown artist’s mixing. Shadows pool beneath the glass, drawing attention to pigment, substrate, and reflected light. In a neighborhood known during the early 2000s for a surging network of studios and galleries, the palette is a quiet reminder of an artist’s role in the evolution of cities.

Heavy Woods is a photographic inquiry into urban life and the long memory of urban land that resonates beyond the confines of Brooklyn, New York, or even the U.S. With investment capital remaking cities and towns across the globe, Knodell’s images trace how change takes hold and how tenuous rootedness is. At the close of  her seminal 1982 book, Loft Living, sociologist Sharon Zukin famously asked: “Who among us will be left in the city to enjoy it and how much will we have to pay?”ⁱ The question has only intensified since then.

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ⁱSharon Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982): 192.

Kyle Knodell (b. 1984, Indianapolis) is a fine art and commercial photographer living in Berlin. He received a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City in 2008. Photographing both personal and public spaces, his work is a search for an alignment of light, form, and feeling within his surroundings. He seeks to capture the often-overlooked everyday objects that populate our built and natural environments, imbuing them with a sense of reverence and beauty. His work has been included in Architectural Digest, The Wall Street Journal, and T: The New York Times Style Magazine. He has exhibited in various group shows in New York and Los Angeles and in a solo show at the Public Gallery in Stockholm, Sweden.

For images and inquiries: info@839gallery.com
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839 N. Cherokee Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90038

Open Saturdays, 12-6 pm, and by appointment

Accessibility and Parking: For the opening reception, we recommend public transit or parking in front of Bancroft Middle School on Las Palmas Ave., a short walk from the gallery. Please note that the gallery has a porch with four steps.