I met a traveler from an antique land / Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert. "Ozymandius": Percy Bysshe Shelley



Stefan gec has modelled in hot glass a representation of a foot. The original of this foot is in Chernobyl where, shortly after the explosion, scientists found a very large glass and larva like object right at the bottom of reactor number 4: this was the solidified remains of the reactor core and the fuel-rods which had fused and melted their way down through the floors of the power station. Hot and extremely radioactive, it is made of uranium isotopes, plutonium, cesium and other deadly debris. They christened this the 'Elephant's Foot', and in order to get a piece for research the scientisys went hunting and shot at it with a Kalashnikov rifle till a chunk came away. Now, like the rest of the facility, the Elephant's Foot is under the thick concrete sarcophagus that covers the site.



Gec's Glass mass looks abstract, but it is loaded with narrative and it becomes a trace not only of the disaster and those involved - an earlier Gec project has celebrated the firemen who lost their lives fighting the reactor blaze - but of the desires and intentions that lead to the formation of this object. Complex constructions and models of how the present and the future might work. A scientific futurism and utopianism which now seems entirely of another time - recent, but beyond retrieval - which we can also see inscribed in the clean aerodynamic lines of high modernist abstract art.



Gec also represents technologies where the worlds that formed them have themselves exploded and melted away. 'Fragment' displays the sleek black basalt form of a Trident Submarine. This craft was commissioned during the Thatcher years and developed to move through, describe, and patrol the geographies of the Cold War. By the time the machine slid down the slipway into the dark water, however, this world had changed irrevocably , leaving it to patrol oceans that it no longer recognised and which were an alien environment for the leviathan.



Stefan Gec shows us technologies slipping into the state of exile.



Much of what the artist uses was made in the Soviet Union, and so is now anchored from the aspirations, the ideologies and the economic sysyems that shaped them. The space training machines of 'Star City' in Russia become emblematic of a future and an 'historical inevitability' that has slipped out of the real. Other works, however, warn us against loading any 'Western' triumphalism into these slippages. 'The Outside World' presents us with a delicate computer rendering of a telecommunications toer: a beautiful, engineered filigree represents an actual structure which also acts as a marker of a boundary between states. The computer that has made the image, and the networks of telecommunication that the tower itself supports, are the technologies that are displacing the highly developed descendants of the triumph of Victorian engineering that the spaceship or space- station represents. Rather than the physical engineering of metal and glass it is the mercurial determinations of 'infoemation' that are the new determining forces. These will shape the new environments and actualities and will inevitably edge our own fragile present - and our imagined futures - into an irretrievable, fantasic past.



Richard Grayson September 2004