Possesion at Snow Gallery
‘Possession’ begins as a whisper, a word too heavy for its own syllables. At Snow Gallery in Brooklyn, it takes on a pulse. The exhibition gathers four artists whose works move between invocation and excess, ritual and performance. Alan Vega’s ghost presides. His current hums in the walls like electricity, animating gestures, sounds, and figures that refuse stillness.
“There are people on whom even clean linen looks indecent.”
Raúl de Nieves stages color as resurrection. His beaded worlds and sequined bodies remember both church and club, sacred devotion and erotic pageant. Adrienne Greenblatt turns light into a threshold. Her images oscillate between apparition and embodiment, where the feminine gaze mutates into something spectral yet sovereign. Jake Latakas Orrall converts sound into object, sculpting echoes that vibrate through the room, giving form to frequencies Vega once fed with distortion and pulse.
And then there is DeLaney. His canvases disturb in their precision, surgical and indecent at once. The images, born from his own photographs, appear warped, nearly liquefied before the brush arrests them. He cites the vulgar as a tool, cutting beneath the skin of painting to reach what festers underneath. His work recalls the convulsions of Isabelle Adjani in Żuławski’s Possession’, where delirium and divinity become indistinguishable.
At Snow Gallery, Possession functions as a practice of transmission. Each artist channels an unseen presence, their work float with energy that feels borrowed and fully renewed. Vega’s influence resists memorialization and imitation. It lingers as a haunting force, demanding attention and presence.
The term possession implies both control and surrender, ownership and release. What we find in the gallery resembles a collective séance, a space where creation emerges through being overtaken. The body and the image respond to forces that insist on expression, producing work that speaks from beyond the conscious will of the artists.
Raúl de Nieves (b. 1983, Morelia, Michoacán, Mexico) is a multimedia artist, performer, and musician based in Brooklyn, NY. His work blends Mexican vernacular and Catholic iconography with references to drag, fantasy, craft, and ritual. De Nieves often transforms modest, everyday or discarded materials, beads, sequins, tape, found clothing, into ornate sculptures, immersive environments, and performance objects.
Adrienne Greenblatt (b. 1995, Reading, UK) is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist, curator, and poet. Working across glass, performance, and sound, their practice draws from alchemy, the body, and esotericism. A graduate of the University of Texas at Austin with further training at UrbanGlass, Greenblatt has presented work at Blade Study, The Hole, M. Leblanc, and KAJE, and co-runs the sound project nochipa with Ren Sanchez.
Jake Latakas Orrall is an interdisciplinary artist, composer, archivist, and producer/engineer based in the United States. Born in Boston in 1986, Orrall’s creative path spans music, visual arts, and experimental sound practices. He co-founded the Earthbound Sound studio in 2021 and continues to evolve his work through sound experiments, visual media, and performance.
Thomas DeLaney (b. 1977, Tallahassee, FL) is a New York-based multimedia artist whose work merges painting, drawing, and digital media. A graduate of Florida State University (BFA in Studio Art), DeLaney reconfigures visual data from film, television, and digital imagery to reflect on absence, identity, and loss. His practice of appropriation destabilizes familiar images, revealing unconscious impulses and fragments of contemporary visual excess.
Alan Vega (born Alan Bermowitz; June 23, 1938 – July 16, 2016) was a New York–based musician and visual artist, best known as one half of the proto-punk duo Suicide. Trained at Brooklyn College with mentors like Ad Reinhardt, Vega began his career in visual art, creating light sculptures and image-based works.
Possesion on view through October 19, 2025.
Snow Gallery
430 Via Vespucci, New York 11211
Words by DONALD GJOKA
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