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
Adrienne Greenblatt
Jake Latakas Orrall
DeLaney
Words by DONALD GJOKA
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