Miles Greenberg, Late October
Toronto
17 September 2021 –
18 December 2021
Miles Greenberg’s most recent project Late October took place at Arsenal Contemporary Art Toronto late last Fall. Precious Okoyomon’s poem “Late October” appeared as a sort of precursory libation at the entrance to the exhibition. The poem speaks to an interregnum that many of us have explicitly and implicitly come to feel. By interregnum here, we refer to the possible (felt) lull, in-between epochs, a sense of a staid impasse of moving from one season to another. Greenberg’s video performances and an expanded sculptural practice he presents throughout the exhibition inculcate the affective space of our present “late October,” thus evincing an acute allegorization of an autumnal “interregnum”, imbibing an even greater exasperation of the lulling “Octobers” of present lives. Greenberg’s Late October emits mist, melancholia and a deeply felt sense of an interregnum―his/their/this and other “late Octobers.” It is ensconced in a vacillation of our epoch’s social promises, the excruciatingly spectral and interminable senses of unfulfillment. Greenberg’s arduous allegory of impasse contends with an overcast autumnal mist and an enveloping fog.
This sense of a numbed in-between, of an endlessly gray vacillation is gleaned in the very atmospheres of Greenberg’s exhibition: sentiments of a prolonged pandemic late-liberal moment. Okoyomon writes as a backdrop to Greenberg’s show:
optical
distance buffer song
Holding patterns
Code break
Edge Rimmer
aural dreamer
hold that sound thickness
Tear that modular shift
October breeze
The impossible interrogation
Body
Edgeshift
Late October is divided into
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