Various/Artists is pleased to present Possession With Intent, an exhibition of new solo work by New York-based artist Siebren Versteeg. The show’s title gestures toward both juridical charge and supernatural haunting, suggesting an uneasy entanglement of control and surrender in a world ubiquitously documented and augmented by media. Across sculpture, screen, and installation, Versteeg poetically asks what happens when the subject is not only represented but re-performed—endlessly fed back, algorithmically rendered, and offered up for sale.

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The works in the show oscillate between analog intimacy and digital recursion. An enormous mirror-faced hammer greets viewers at the entrance—part gavel, part funhouse—setting the tone for a space where judgment is not passed but ambient, encoded into the surfaces and interfaces we touch and are touched by. Nearby, long horizontal paintings Feed Your Head span ten feet across but rise just thirteen inches tall. Too wide for an apprehending view, they mimic the scan of the feed, echoing sublime proportions as well as those of the human head. Their surfaces read like code or scripture: repetitive, ornamental, and elusive.

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Recalling both Warhol's Empire and Dennis Oppenheim’s inverted churches, the work titled Device to Root Out Evil (Arm Around a Memory) renders an 8-bit live feed of the Empire State Building on an upside-down screen, literally shoved into 300 lbs. of concrete—a makeshift monument that recontextualizes through compression and inversion. Inpainting (Demon Seed) (2025) considers the inevitable slush of regurgitative A.I. by cunningly reframing a VHS copy of the sci-fi classic into a video miniature of the house of its own making—an ouroboros reflection from analog, to digital, then back again.

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Versteeg’s materials—concrete, glass, obsolete tech, ephemeral feeds—are not symbolic so much as symptomatic. They perform media theory through code and matter: the collapse of public and private, the reification of attention, the fetishism of data. Humor surfaces, as does unease. Commodity, after all, is never just a product—it is also the promise of presence; a staging of both the intimate and the alienated. These works ask not what we see, but who—or what—is watching, caching, predicting.

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If A.I. is our afterlife in data, Possession With Intent stages a séance in plain view. The ghosts are not coming. They are here, and they are hungry.
 

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Siebren Versteeg lives and works in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. He has exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibitions including The Living End, Painting and Other Technologies, 1970-2020 at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, Up the Ghost at bitforms gallery, Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965-2018 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, Painting in the Network: Algorithm and Appropriation, Cressman Center for Visual Art, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, DREAMLANDS: IMMERSIVE CINEMA AND ART, 1906-2015, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, NY and Invisible Threads: Technology and its Discontents, The Art Gallery at New York University, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Versteeg’s work has been written about in ArtNet, Art Forum, Battery Journal, The New York Times, Hyperallergic, TimeOut Chicago among others. In 2023 OUTLAND's Sarah Zucker declared Versteeg's debut NFT collection entitled "For a Limited Time" one of the best digital artworks of that same year. He is represented by bitforms gallery.​