Nick Relph was born in London, UK in 1979, and currently works and resides in New York, USA. Relph rose to prominence in the early 2000’s, through his collaborative work with Oliver Payne, chronicling contemporary culture through their idiosyncratic approach to film-making.
Relph’s interest in material and social effects of culture is examined through vast references and sources - from connecting the history of tartan to Ellsworth Kelly and Comme des Garçons within his films, to his scans of digital renderings of building developments in New York, which he documents during his walks through the city using a VuPoint Magic Wand, a cheap hand-held scanner no larger than a toothbrush. The latter has provided basis for his videos shown at Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn in 2017, as well as his enlarged cityscape collages currently on view at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen as part of “Post-Capital: Art and the Economics of the Digital Age.”
Relph’s “Eclipse Body & Soul Syntax” was published by Pre-Echo Press in 2021, as an archive of imagery Relph has amassed over seven years of digitising and scanning the aforementioned construction site notices, or as “a sort of unofficial and urgent index of a new city quickly replacing an old one”. (Matt Connors, Pre-Echo Press)
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