This is my favourite piece from Rod Gray’s latest exhibit, Tracking Station (on show at Level 2/39 Little Collins St until Nov 21). 

I stumbled upon Rod’s work when I was out for lunch at the Napier Hotel.  More accurately, my wife did, and dragged myself and lizbt up to see his work. 

He is inspired by his time at Mt Stromlo, Canberra collecting fire ravaged parts of the Great Melbourne Telescope.

His work, and this piece in particular, resonates strongly with me.  It evokes a decayed space age. 

For the same reason I am loving Ellis’s Ignition City (issue 5 came out last week, why haven’t I read it yet?  Supergod starts this week;  I am incredibly psyched for that!)

I spent my youth filling scapbooks with newspaper clippings of the promised space age.  Torn out pieces of paper announcing that the International Space Station would be complete by 1995.  Carefully clipped plans for a spaceport near Cairns.

In 1995 I would turn 20years old, so I was perfectly on track for my desired life as an astronaut.  I read somewhere that you could pre-adapt the body for space by elevating the end of your bed, so of course it did just that.  

Fifteen years later and space elevators are just making it into mainstream press, the US is about to retire it’s disastrous shuttle fleet, and Kazakhstan is the country from which humans are mostly regularly hurtled into the heavens.  In my mind it looks just like that painting.

When I was chatting with Rod at the opening night last Wednesday he admired my Russian space dog tags.  After watching this doco on British street styles, I realized I too was dressing aspirationally.  To live the life of the space marine I longed for as that teenager. 

I don’t think I’m the only one.  We don’t want what the rich have, we want the future we were promised.  It’s probably about time we stopped waiting, and started building it for ourselves.