“And there is an exhaustion in wanting/having to do so.” “There is a slight rush in gathering more and knowing there are more to get,” Relph wrote in an email after our interview. Meanwhile, in the analog city, beginning in 2011, construction spending grew for eight consecutive years, reaching an all-time high of $60.6 billion in 2019 before the pandemic slump, more than any other American city, completely transforming swaths of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. Eventually, the work came to seem as if he was erecting a parallel-dimension New York in its entirety on his hard drives. The project was first included in MoMA PS 1’s “Greater New York” exhibition in 2015 but at that point, Relph said, he was really only getting started. At times over the last several years, he said, the building posters consumed his thinking, the city’s up-and-out overdrive providing him with more material than he could possibly encompass.
Acting as a kind of human image-scraper, he has spent the past seven years amassing a vast archive of renderings of the buildings that form or will form the city’s sardine-can skyline, a once and future New York that feels mythical, mind-boggling, and often, frankly, terrifying.Īs a teenager, Relph was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, which he continues to manage and which has shaped portions of his work. And so instead of leaving art on the streets, Relph is slowly extracting it.
Except that in place of a spray can or glue roller, his instrument is a lightweight VuPoint Magic Wand digital scanner, a cheap device about the size of an electric toothbrush, often used to digitize book pages and legal documents. He swipes it rhythmically up and down the wooden fencing and its building poster, a motion common to generations of graffitists and guerrilla wheat-paste-poster artists. The British artist Nick Relph likes to wander New York under cover of night, loitering in the vicinity of the city’s ubiquitous construction fences, doing a thing that seems at first glance - especially if you are a police officer - immediately identifiable.