re.riddle at MSP

SF Art Galleries - Openings & Events Event source calendar Event Link: see venue calendar above ^^ Near Poets Curated by Kay Jaramillo Aaron Elvis Jupin, Arthur Wechsler, Brian Rideout, Kira Maria Shewfelt, Quintessa Matranga, Sophie Lourdes Knight, Will Yackulic July 23 - August 29, 2026 Opening Reception: Saturday, August 8th from 5-7pm re.riddle is pleased to present Near Poets, a group exhibition curated by Kay Jaramillo, featuring paintings by Aaron Elvis Jupin, Arthur Wechsler, Brian Rideout, Kira Maria Shewfelt, Quintessa Matranga, Sophie Lourdes Knight and Will Yackulic. The opening reception will take place on Saturday August 8th from 5-7pm at 1275 Minnesota Street, San Francisco. The exhibition runs through Aug 29, 2026. Exhibition Statement Exploring the room as a vessel for memory and inherited history, Near Poets invites each artist to situate a painting within a historical room of their choosing. Given minimal parameters, the selected rooms vary widely, with no shared time period, historical figure, movement, architectural style, or decorative language connecting them. This imaginative act finds resonance in Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space (1958), in which he considers how the psychological experience of physical surroundings such as houses and rooms shapes our thoughts, memories, and desires. For Bachelard, when one experiences a poetic image of space, it "reverberates" or takes root in us, making us "poets" in the phenomenological sense. Such images awaken a state of reverie in the viewer, and in turn we become a "poet"—not an author, one who consciously inhabits the imagination. It is from this idea that the exhibition takes its title. What began as a meditation on the value of blue, inspired by her eldest child's affinity for the color, led Kira Maria Shewfelt (b. 1984) to the transcendent, luminous ultramarine of Giotto's frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel. Shewfelt describes Giotto's blue as activating what she calls a "sense of the unseen," drawing her into a realm beyond linear time. Echoing the ethereal imagery of the frescoes, A prayer to the night sky for bravery is filled with fanciful lions, flowers and stars inspired by the enigmatic skies shared across the ages. In another celestial study of blue, Sophie Lourdes Knight’s (b. 1992) The Glass Rabbit rests in The Octagon Room in the Royal Observatory, London, alongside scientific instruments that, like the figurine, point upward toward the sky and the worlds beyond. Originally built in 1933, the Antwerp Sportpaleis arena housed the largest indoor wooden velodrome in Europe, hosting six-day cycling races and track events, while spectators gathered in the central restaurant and hospitality area. Arthur Wechsler (b. 2000) reimagines the iconic "cyclists' crouch" of Art Deco advertisements in Eddy, placing it within the arena celebrating the mechanics and endurance of the sport. The leisurely reader in Quintessa Matranga’s (b. 1989) Abacus resides in the Corinthian Yacht Club in Tiburon, the second-oldest yacht club in Northern California founded in 1886. Named after the sailing term "Corinthian," referring to amateur sportsmanship, the club was founded in direct response to the elitist domination of sailing in the Bay, with the aim of making the sport accessible to amateurs and enthusiasts alike. Within FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C., stands Theodore Kaczynski's one-room cabin (aka the Unabomber). Before its arrival there, it was dismantled, transported, and reconstructed inside a vast industrial warehouse in Sacramento, where it remained for over a decade, bearing an uncanny resemblance to a typical gallery space with its stark white walls and overhead lighting. In Scram, Aaron Elvis Jupin (b. 1991) places the iconic Sesame Street character alongside the cabin, drawing an unexpected parallel between two hermetic figures whose forms of isolation echo one another. Similarly engaged with the display and preservation of cultural artifacts, Will…