Hide and Seek

Depicts an image of two soldiers from the Second Gulf War in Iraq engaged in combat in a fragmented, pixilated style. The original image is derived from one found on the Internet and then superimposed with an image from a video game. The work suggests that the images of war we receive via the media are highly censored and as a consequence, we can only ever have a fragmented perception of what reality is like for the soldiers and peacekeepers currently in Iraq. In addition the work may be referencing the new recruitment techniques used by the US Army following September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre; there are a number of free games that can be downloaded from the Internet which simulate life in the army. One of the most popular online games is called 'America's Army', and as of late 2007 was the one of the top ten PC online action games. They were developed because traditional recruiting techniques were no longer as effective as they had been.

Born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1954, Christopher Langton came to Australia in 1973. During the 1990s he became well known for his large scale inflatable sculptures. In 2004 he became interested in the theme of 'simulated realities', computer games and the blurring of 'real life', experience and illusion. In this work, the machine gun placement in the foreground of the painting heightens the sense of the viewer participating or being close to the action taking place in the painting, creating a sense of tension and highlighting the 'intimacy and co-ordination between comrades in an intense and dangerous moment'. The blurring of games and reality on which this painting is based similarly suggests that 'this war's boundaries between a soldier's reality and a civilians are somewhat similar; the targets and threats are not clear'.

Christopher Langton's art form is derived from his large sculptural plastic works. For his two dimensional paintings he uses an image from which he creates a digital form , which is vectorised with a computer and a mosaic of black lines formed. The black lines image is fed into a computer controlled stencil cutting machine as used by sign writers. The cut stencil sheet is placed on the thick 1mm PVC and parts of the stencil are removed. Areas are then painted or spray painted onto the reverse of the PVC. A new colour is chosen and picked out using a coded plan of the image for all 52 colours used. The black outline helps to keep the image crisp and is a border for each coloured space.