DESIRE PATH

Salon 94 is pleased to present Desire Path, a solo exhibition of new works from artist Miles Greenberg (b. 1997 in Montreal, Canada). The exhibition is the first US solo show by Greenberg dedicated solely to his sculptural practice and debuts his new work in marble.

With a decade-long career spanning from Beijing to Paris and now New York, the presentation at Salon 94 marks the artist’s inaugural presentation with the gallery. On display are figurative sculptures in Carrara marble, created by digitally mapping the bodies in movement in the artist’s durational performance, Fountain II, debuted at New York’s Pace Gallery in 2023. Building on the artist’s deep connection between performance and permanence, this new series of sculptural works explore notions of time and its preservation—be it of heartbreak or euphoria. While different in its mode of display, the romanticism of classical sculpture, the rigor of modern architecture and the nuanced understanding of how energy flows through a body, constitutes the foundation of Greenberg’s sculptural practice much as it does his movement work.

Greenberg’s new sculptures are fabricated using digital manipulation and scanning techniques: he hacks his hand-held 3D scanner to reduce its ability to self-correct in capturing movement. Each scan is then machine-carved into blocks of pink, black and white marble, before being hand- finished by the artist.

The result is a series of otherworldly sculptures which appear to glitch forth from the performance work – itself offering drawings as artist study; figures embracing, distorted chests, hands and body parts, rivulets of quartz tracing down surfaces like hemorrhaging blood or tears.

Greenberg worked at Monumental Labs in Mount Vernon to produce the new series, marking the first time he's worked at this scale. His continued fascination with marble—both in its historical context and as a contemporary medium expanding the opportunities of 3D imaging—is central to the exhibition.

Accompanying the sculptures are new 9-hour long video-based works of the artist's recent performances including SEBASTIAN (2023) first performed and debuted at the 60th Biennale Arte in Venice and RESPAWN (2024) from the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Rigorous and ritualistic in its methodology, Greenberg’s universe relies on slowness and the decay of form to heighten the audiences’ sensitivities. The work follows self-contained, nonlinear systems of logic that are best understood in relation to one another.

Discussing the title, Miles Greenberg comments: ‘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. Onstage, I often feel when two performers synchronize, we trace desire paths of sorts together, over and over – we find a common resonance, intuitively finding shortcuts for maximizing our sensorial output. 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 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.’

For more information about this exhibition, please contact Trang Tran (trang@salon94design.com)

For press inquiries, please contact Emma Gilhooly (emma@pelhamcommunications.com)