Artist Nick Relph is turning New York’s development boom into digital art ‘scans’

2021-11-20T09:00:00-05:00

Relph’s collection might be described as the first post-internet expression of the genre. The images mostly show buildings that are, in one sense, real or in the process of becoming so. But the rendering posters, created by design firms and developers, are also highly fictive, cinematic branding documents created to comply with a city law requiring public images of buildings under construction.

The arch flaneur Nick Relph has been documenting the city’s whirlwind transformation since the Gulliani administration and, for the past seven years, incorporating a VuPoint digital scanner into his work to produce a physical record of the changes that first made its debut in 2015 in MoMA PS1’s Greater New York survey.

Relph’s new book, called Eclipse Body & Soul Syntax, hit the shelves this month from publisher Pre-Echo.

“It was really about just having the scanner with me in my bag when I was walking around,” the 42-year-old Relph told the Times’ Randy Kennedy. “I’m a walker. That’s how I make work, generally speaking. I just couldn’t ignore these posters, these very stark images. I pay attention to images. And the purpose of these is in one sense clearly defined and in another not at all.”

Image courtesy Pre-Echo Press

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Artist Nick Relph is turning New York’s development boom into digital art ‘scans’