Miles Greenberg, Narcissus I, 2021

Miles Greenberg (b. 1997 in Montreal, Canada) is a New York-based performance artist and sculptor. His work consists of large-scale, sensorially immersive and often site-specific environments revolving around the physical body in space. These installations are activated with often extreme durational performances that invoke the body as sculptural material. These performances are then captured in real time before the audience to generate later video works and sculptures. Rigorous and ritualistic in its methodology, Greenberg’s universe relies on slowness and the decay of form to heighten the audience’s sensitivities. The work follows self-contained, non-linear systems of logic that are best understood in relation to one another. At age seventeen, Greenberg left formal education, launching himself into four years of independent research on movement and architecture, which spanned a number of residencies in Paris, northern Italy, Beijing and New York. He has worked under the mentorship of Édouard Lock, Robert Wilson and Marina Abramović, and has since exhibited extensively internationally.

On 'Late October':

In 2020, Greenberg staged an elaborate live installation titled Late October, which was inhabited by seven performers, including himself, for seven consecutive hours at Galleria Continua Les Moulins, an hour east of Paris. Perched atop rotating plinths and blinded by white contact lenses, the nude lacquered bodies of the performers revolved slowly above an ice blue basin.

From this performance, Greenberg has gone on to create additional artworks as part of the series: a single-channel film edition, a 3-channel film edition and installation, and 3 new sculptures. Icarus I, Narcissus I, and Orpheus I (all 2021), are Greenberg's first body of sculptural work. Developed as an extension of Late October, this series marks the artist’s first experiments into formally sculptural work. While different in its mode of display, the romanticism of classical sculpture, the rigour 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. Titled after young figures of cautionary tales from Greek mythology who suffer calamity due to human fallibility the sculptures represent an archival method of documenting the artist’s performance practice as much as they are their own investigations into art history and its relationship with entropy.

To achieve his visual desire for the erosion that takes place in sculptures naturally over time, Greenberg hacked the software of the 3D scanner to create glitches in the scans of movements. Much like the chance encounters that occur with live performance, this digital manipulation allows Greenberg to capture moments of disruption in the sculptural making process. Milled from a high-density material that could eventually be molded and cast in bronze as positives, the sculptures are works in progress as part of the evolution of Late October and proposals for future work.

Curated by Azu Nwagbogu: Tales for a Stranger

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