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

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

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 Yackulic’s (b. 1975) still life Antiquities (At The Met II) rests within the Greek and Roman atrium at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (The Leon Levy and Shelby White Court). A focal point of the museum’s classical wing, the atrium resembles an ancient Roman villa with a skylit peristyle to illuminate the various marble figures, reliefs, and sarcophagi. 

In keeping with the tradition of painting as historical record, Painting for the Estate (Henry ‘Hank’ S. McNeil, Jr.) by Brian Rideout (b. 1986) takes its imagery from the Christie’s promotional material for their 20th/21st-century sale, featuring renowned minimal artworks from the collection of Henry ‘Hank’ S. McNeil, Jr. Set within a handmade frame referencing the minimalist collection, the painting will hang in the same home as the collection itself, an ode and a record of the collection that no longer is.

Though these paintings span disparate places, they are united by an act of fictional placement. Imagined rather than realized, they carry a subtle note of fantasy because they will never exist in their intended spaces. Existing only in the mind's eye, these encounters invite viewers to inhabit spaces they could never otherwise experience and to reconsider those they already know. By way of fantasy, the artist can play with widening or loosening the institutional conditions surrounding making, display, circulation, and ownership. Leading with imagination and the phenomena of reverie, we are offered a momentary untethering from prescribed ways of production, reception and consumption of artworks within our contemporary matrix, whose structures are made to seem inevitable.

Artworks

BIOS

GUEST CURATOR
Kay Jaramillo (b.1991) is an independent curator and consultant based in San Francisco. Drawing on years of experience working at the intersection of contemporary art and collectible design, her curatorial practice explores unexpected dialogues across disciplines. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Art History from San Francisco State University

ARTISTS
Aaron Elvis Jupin (b. 1991) received a BFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2014. He has had recent solo exhibitions at the galleries Moskowitz Bayse in Los Angeles, CA; Makasiini Contemporary in Turku, Finland; and Fisher Parrish in Brooklyn, NY. His works have been included in group exhibitions at Jeffrey Deitch/American Art Projects in Berlin, Germany and Miami, FL; Zepster, Karma and The Hole in New York, NY; The Long Beach Museum of Art in Long Beach, CA; Here in Pittsburgh, PA; Guerrero Gallery, Michael Benevento, and Moskowitz Bayse in Los Angeles; Museum of Museums in Seattle, WA; and Woaw Gallery in Hong Kong, among others. He lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Arthur Wechsler (b. 2000) is a Los Angeles–based painter whose work explores perception through familiar subjects, including animals, vernacular architecture, landscapes, and everyday urban spaces. Rather than pursuing realism, his paintings investigate the point at which representation begins to dissolve into abstraction through color, surface, and visible brushwork. He is interested in images that feel immediate—as though they are being encountered for the first time—while remaining conscious of their construction as paintings. Working with a restrained palette and direct compositions, Wechsler treats painting as both an image and a physical object, allowing the marks and materiality of the medium to remain present. His practice draws upon a tradition of painters who privilege observation over illusion, seeking beauty in ordinary moments without sentimentality. A graduate of UCLA, Wechsler has exhibited in juried exhibitions, Atrium art fair with Cruise Control Contemporary, and Barry McGee's 99 cent group show in Los Angeles.

Brian Rideout (b. 1986) makes paintings about pictures. His work investigates contemporary images, sourced from print and online, for their art-historical relevance, as a continuation of the history of painting and image production. Rideout’s works comprise a narrative of art, architecture, and object following an undulating cycle of definition, utility, and design, softly dramatizing the multiple registers that art has come to occupy and employ over time as a material thing wholly existing in the world. He is interested in painting as document, as decoration, as ideological accessory, as technological or functional support. He studied at Georgian College and was the 2017 recipient of The Premier’s Awards for Excellence in the Arts (Emerging). Recent solo exhibitions have taken place at Patrick Parrish Gallery (New York), Towards Gallery (Toronto), Tile Blush (Miami). His work is included in the private collections of TD Bank, RBC, National Bank of Canada, and Estée Lauder.

Kira Maria Shewfelt (b. 1984) is a painter based in Los Angeles. Taking influence from literary genres of Magical Realism and Romanticism, her painting explores the physical-spiritual connections of contemporary life in saturated chroma, a highly touched painting style, and an interest in movement and gestures. Her subjects enact intimate moments, a desire for symbolic resonance, and quest for integrity in living and being. Shewfelt cultivates a visual language, equal parts personal and metaphoric, engaging her imagery’s open relationship to a shared and often communal narrative. She received an MFA from New York University, M.A. in Art History from the University of Southern California, and B.A. in Comparative Literature from Yale University. Her work can be found in the collection of AMOCA Wales and private collections internationally.

Quintessa Matranga (b. 1989) lives and works in San Francisco. Matranga seems less interested in developing a critical apparatus for the medium of painting, its market supremacy, and its constant re-juvenation amidst the genre specific impasses of art history. Rather she has developed a method of image-making that is uniquely figurative and conceptual; by adjoining form and concept she generates a multiplicity of connotations and narratives. Previously known for creating mostly conceptual paintings exploring humor and personal narrative content, Matranga’s works now reveal a painterly core and pictorial language that reflects her day-to-day life more than anything else. The images have become more lyrical than conceptual, more humanist than ironic. Matranga’s paintings now reach for the ecumenical (i.e. the general and inclusive) rather than the singular statement. Matranga has crafted a body of work that gains sustenance from the value and meaning produced by the psychology of the viewer. Our comprehension feeds the artwork as the painted scaly backgrounds encircle us, squeezing out from our hearts and minds, our emotional and philosophical responses. Quintessa Matranga has been the subject of solo exhibitions at What Pipeline, Detroit (2022,2019), Sandy Brown, Berlin (2018), Freddy, Harris (2017), and Queer Thoughts, New York (2017). Selected group exhibitions include TOKAS, Tokyo (2020), Bureau, New York (2020) Carlos Ishikawa, London (2018), Karma International, Los Angeles (2017), Pilar Corias, London (2017), and Et. al, San Francisco (2016).

Sophie Lourdes Knight (b. 1992) is a multidisciplinary artist from California, USA. She studied at California College of the Arts, graduating with a BFA in 2014, and at the Slade School of Fine Art, graduating with an MFA in 2022. Her work has recently been shown in solo exhibitions at Zevitas Marcus in Los Angeles, CA, Steven Zevitas Gallery in Boston, MA, and Esqueleto, CA as well as group exhibitions at the Royal Academy in London, ASC Gallery in London, the San Jose Museum of Contemporary Art, CA, Southern Exposure, CA, the Golden Foundation, NY and The Split Gallery, London UK. She is a co-curator of the RELAY Exhibition Series in Oakland, CA, and a 2019 & 2020 Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation awardee. She lives and works in London, UK.

Will Yackulic (b.1975) has exhibited at Berkeley Art Museum, Art in General, and Crocker Art Museum. His work has been reviewed in Artforum, Flash Art, Art on Paper, Le Monde, Time Out London, Village Voice, The Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Bay Guardian, and Los Angeles Times. His work is held in the permanent collections of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Berkeley Art Museum, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, amongst others. Yackulic currently lives and works in Berkeley, California.