If you’re familiar with Miles Greenberg’s work (we actually interviewed him in 2020), then you know his practice is mostly based on performance. After exhibiting (and performing) worldwide, from Paris and New York to Beijing and Venice, his practice has expanded beyond the ephemeral and is gaining a physical body inspired by his performance-based works. The most recent example is his first solo show in the United States, titled Desire Path, and on view at Salon94 through February 15.
Speaking of the exhibition’s title, Greenberg explains: “A ‘desire path’ is an unofficial route that occurs naturally when people intuitively walk the same trajectory many times over; it’s often about finding the shortest distance between two points.” Linking it to his artistic practice, he continues: “Onstage, I often feel when two performers synchronise, we trace desire paths of sorts together, over and over — we find a common resonance, intuitively finding shortcuts for maximising our sensorial output.”
The series of works presented at Salon94 are sculptures in pink, black, and white Carrara marble that Greenberg has made at Monumental Labs in Mount Vernon. And the process behind them is quite interesting: aiming to turn his performances into enduring, physical pieces, the artist first digitally mapped the bodies in movement during his 2023 performance Fountain II and then machine-carved those scans into blocks of marble. But it doesn’t stop there. Blurring the lines between the tangible and intangible, he hacks the scanner to create more ‘imperfect’ results, resembling digital glitches — but in one of the most historical material used throughout art history. Hence, the artworks exhibited at the NYC gallery include distorted chests, hands, and other body parts, or semi-complete figures embracing.
Speaking further of his solo show, Miles says: “There’s something deeply sensual about the idea behind a desire path – not just in name, but in nature – the act of building on someone else’s intuition, blindly; you leave behind the memory of your touch, and and a stranger then remembers you through their own body, again and again, until the shape of the world around you changes, like a river carving through a continent.”
