Join re.riddle this Wednesday, December 3 from 6-7 PM for an engaging talk with artist and former SFAI Professor Emerita Pegan Brooke @peganbrooke & Jessica Shaefer @jessshaefer , Executive Director of the Bolinas Museum, California.

In her solo exhibition Into absence, MIST at re.riddle, Pegan Brooke explores mist as a phenomenon that evokes the atemporality and sensation experienced in the after-space. Mist carries the feeling that something lingers, at once heavy and diffuse, tangible and ungraspable. Brooke’s monochromatic paintings explore this porous, uncanny state, where mist is neither fully water nor air, yet asserts itself as both occupant of space and medium through which space becomes perceptible, material, and opaque. Mist thus becomes both metaphor and medium for the open, undefined terrain offering a visual and tactile structure for the after-space.

This same haptic density is realized in Brooke’s complex, layered paintings, built through incremental accumulation, brushstroke by brushstroke, line by line. The horizontal planes and delicate lines that traverse her canvases establish a rhythm and architecture of space that is grounding and dissolving. Her precise, reflective painting technique evokes the way mist holds shadow and channels light, subtly creating a perceptual experience that is at once material and ephemeral.

After the rain stops, what lingers is not the storm but the shimmer of leaves, the smell of damp earth, the space cleared for light. Like mist, this space holds traces of what was and whispers of what might yet arrive. Brooke’s Into absence, MIST suggests that the opened space after loss is not simply vacant—it invites us to attend to what opens up, emerges and stays on, however faintly and luminously.

Jessica Shaefer is the Executive Director of the Bolinas Museum in Northern California. She previously worked with Gray Area for Google, where she led an international program commissioning large-scale art installations. Prior to that, Jessica led public programming and partnerships at Meta Open Arts. She has also worked with Sites Unseen, producing public art installations and activations in downtown San Francisco, and with Creative Time in New York City, helping to bring groundbreaking public projects to national attention. Jessica graduated from Wesleyan University in Connecticut with an honors degree in the College of Letters, focusing on philosophy and French literature. She has been a member of the Board of Directors at The Lab, a nonprofit experimental art and music space in San Francisco’s Mission district, since 2014, and a member of the BoD of Artadia, a national nonprofit that supports innovative visual artists with unrestricted, merit-based financial awards, since 2022.