City buildings. Why do they appear? What do they do to us?
What do they mean? So opportunistic and dense, they fill space, ascending from a hole in the earth towards what once was heaven, but now is only the future. They become a constant landscape, moving as we move; sometimes forever in the distance like mountains we may never travel to; sometimes standing over us, all gross attitude and fashionable bleakness. Like pyramids and earlier megaliths, their creation speaks of death. Perishable, massive, great engines of consumption and shelter, working drones that shoulder each other aside as they shuffle to the sea, graceless glaciers.
Kim Vernon’s drawings and paintings are a deep and patient response to the cities he has lived in and travelled to. He has seen, particularly in the buildings of Hong Kong, how human presence will slyly permeate these geometrical mechanisms and corrupt their visceral integrity. How buildings will come to mimic our own organisms, our own relationships; the emotional weather, the blood of violence and family, the entropy.
Given time, these grand monuments succumb to our imperatives of improvisation and transcendence. They become allies in our lives, sharing tragedy, sharing light.
text: Lorender Freeman
