pegan brooke: Into absence, MIST

October 4, 2025 - December 20, 2025

Opening Reception: Saturday, October 4th from 5-7pm

Gallery Hours: Tues - Sat 11am - 5pm
Minnesota Street Project, 1275 Minnesota St., San Francisco

re.riddle is pleased to present Into absence, MIST, a solo exhibition of new works by Pegan Brooke. The opening reception is on Saturday, October 4th from 5-7pm. The exhibition runs through December 20th, 2025.

EXHIBITION STATEMENT

What happens after the rain stops? After loss there is absence, which prompts the question of what may filter into this new space? Artist Pegan Brooke contemplates this after-space as neither void nor negation. Brooke’s interest lies not in the loss itself, but in its absence, the strange and unsettled space that opens in its wake. 

Brooke proposes that in absence there arises a clearing, an opening in which something else begins to gather. Using the natural phenomena of mist as both subject and invitation, she asks what happens in that after-space, and what new presence, unbidden, might emerge? Brooke’s intention is to create an experience for the viewer, while pondering these paintings, that will lead to the viewer’s own space for the opening of a fresh perception, potential and possibility. 

In her solo exhibition Into absence, MIST, 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.

Artworks

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