This painting was created by Ken Aptekar as part of the collaborative project Give & Take, 2001, at the V&A. One of 15 works he made for this exhibition, it demonstrates Aptekar's characteristic method which is itself collaborative and entails the appropriation - or borrowing - of imagery from historic works of art. His quotations from other paintings often take the form of a detail or fragment, and are often depicted in muted grisaille or sepia tones. His paintings usually incorporate texts, derived from discussions with invited museum visitors in response to selected paintings. The edited responses - often intensely personal stories - are sandblasted onto glass panels which are then bolted to the surface of the picture, so that the text veils the image, and the verbal and visual responses of viewer and artist to the original are synthesised in a new work.

Aptekar's incorporation of visitor comments and responses gives an authority to that response and a status equal to that of the image, an authority usually vested only in the artist and the institution. His work is a tacit acknowledgement of the way in which we each bring our own experience to bear on the interpretation of and reaction to a work of art. Thus the largely passive process of gallery visiting becomes an active process, and a kind of collaboration. Galleries and museums naturally privilege the academic / curatorial view, encapsulated on labels and in catalogues, whereas Aptekar challenges this by putting the visitor's response centre-stage, making it a physical feature of the work and the screen through which we must all view the image. The glass bearing the text also reflects the viewer, again emphasising a physical engagement with the work of art, and a personal projection of ideas onto an image. Of course he is also playing with and critiquing decontructionist theories of the work of art as something to be 'read', as a something which prompts an intellectual rather than an emotional or physical response.

'Get Outta That House! (2000) takes a detail from Georg Emil Libert's 1848 painting Snow Scene: The Haunted House. (The V&A has two versions of this picture, both Townshend Bequest - accession. no.1571-1869 painted 1847, and accession no. 1573-1869 painted 1848). In Aptekar's version the house is given more prominence - it is also reversed and appears to lean to the left.