A distorted and disorienting portrait of the modern city, Rainy City Night explores the tension between individuality and conformity. The city is intentionally depicted as dingy, crowded, and chaotic, reflecting Eris' own discomfort with urban environments; cities can feel too loud, too packed, and too overwhelming, and that feeling is expressed through the warped architecture and uneasy atmosphere of the piece. The skyscrapers stretch upward with an almost desperate physicality, straining toward the sky as though they are desperately trying to escape the crowded, messy world below them; with their forms seeming to pull themselves higher and higher, reaching for something beyond the city, yet they are ultimately met with the same ideology as every skyscraper surrounding them. This distortion reinforces the feeling that the rules have been turned upside down, while also suggesting that the buildings are fighting against the world they inhabit.
But beneath the distorted cityscape is a deeper contradiction. Every skyscraper appears to be reaching upward in an attempt to distinguish itself, to rise above the crowd and become something different. Yet every one of them follows the same pattern; in trying to separate themselves from the crowd, they become part of another crowd.
When you follow the crowd for individuality, you cease to become an individual.
That contradiction is the heart of Rainy City Night. The work asks where individuality ends and conformity begins, and whether it is truly possible to escape the crowd when everyone is reaching for the same idea of being different.