Possession

Thomas DeLaney, Adrienne Greenblatt, Raúl de Nieves, Jake Latakas Orrall, Alan Vega

"There are people on whom even clean linen looks indecent."

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, "The Possessed”

Possession. Before its infernal and delightfully entertaining manifestations - in souls, in multiplexes — it's just another word. What kind of possession is at stake? Possession suggests identity has an on/off switch. Is this really you, laid bare in all your carnal and spiritual depravity? Or does a subaltern, a storyteller, and an impostor own you? Possession seeks expression and actualization. Its vocational essence is lawyer no less than poet.

Possession as in ownership, property, chattels; possession as in love or lust, unbridled sexual compulsion and undying love, though love as madness is always a fraught possibility: l'amour fou, Andre Breton’s "mad love." A profession of faith, and maybe a menace. The most floridly and achingly theatrical sense of the word "possession" perforce takes the modifier "demonic." This is also almost its quotidian sense; "The Exorcist" is the master narrative; the Bible provides footnotes. For the insistent popularity of this subject in the movies, you'd think Belial and Beelzebub had commandeered the great studios; Darryl Zanuck and Louis B. Mayer are merely, utterly the ventriloquist's puppets.

Presiding over the gathering is the spirit of Alan Vega-punk prophet, sculptor of light, and co-founder of the radical duo Suicide-whose spectral presence charges the space like a blown fuse humming in the wall. Vega's legacy is not merely cited but inhabited here, an animating force threading through each artist's practice. Raúl de Nieves conjures queer liberation through ecstatic color and costume, drawing from both nightclub and sacred space to create works that invite transformation-a Dionysian revival shaking loose from history's chains.

Adrienne Greenblatt arrives as a sorceress of the visual field, weaving feminine archetype and spectral myth into luminous apparitions that feel both summoned and conjuring. Jake Latakas Orrall channels sonic residue into sculptural sound, extending Vega's voltage into present-day transmissions-feedback, echo, pulse.

DeLaney, in his own words, is "bringing the energy of vulgarity and the taboo into the conservative medium of oil painting; I'm a little more of a surgeon, you have to go a little bit under the surface to create change, to create relief." His paintings evoke the image repertoires of the movies- Isabelle Adjani contorts and spews bloody vomit in Andrzej Zutawski's "Possession." Hollywood and Ken Russell's "The Devils" come to mind. However, DeLaney's images all come from real life, beginning with photos he takes of his own friends, or in one case an image sourced from an 80s McDonalds employee instructional video. These are then digitally distorted, then painted. Thus real life, it seems, is more possessed than the movies.

Each artist appears possessed, not by nostalgia but by transmission: caught in Vega's wake, tuning into frequencies of disruption, trance, ritual, and release.

—David Rimanelli