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Vast and luminescent, Mark Hilton's exquisitely-detailed lightboxes belie the Melbourne artist's fascination with the darkest recesses of contemporary experience. As the most striking examples of an expansive and rigorous practice, which incorporates drawing, painting, sculpture and video, Hilton's lightboxes document unsettling topical events - sexual assault, murder, and impropriety in the AFL. Hilton's further achievement is to represent and re-situate these events within a historically specific aesthetic, expressive of a wider concern with the 'writing' of history.

In Champion, 2006, the racially-motivated gang rapes committed by young men from Sydney's Lebanese community are rendered with the jewel-like palette of Persian court painting. Alexandra Avenue - presented in 2004 as a massive, 3 x 10 metre, mural on glass, and in 2006 as a large-scale, double-sided lightbox - references traditional Chinese coffin-lid carvings in its depiction of Melbourne's 2002 Salt nightclub killings, in which a nineteen year old man was stabbed with a samurai sword and two men drowned in the Yarra River. Knackers,2006, transports the all-too familiar occurrence of sexual assault allegations within a sporting code - in this instance, allegations laid at the football boots of two St Kilda 'Saints' in 2004 - to the world of questing knights, canny wenches and medieval frescoes.

The effect is disquieting. Drawn to the light, the viewer who encounters Champion is first beguiled by its ornamental beauty then somehow caught out. 'My work rewards closer inspection',  Hilton states, though 'reward' is too imprecise a term to apply to the viewer's complex and dawning recognition of the work's sinister subject. As Hilton's pleasing figures resolve themselves in our mind, we discover in Champion a landscape of drama and pathos. The high perspective line enables Hilton to arrange groups of figures, trees and architectural motifs without overcrowding, and to depict in the one pictorial space elements of four separate sexual attacks, the notorious Sydney gang rapes committed in August and September 2000.

The artist cloaks atrocity in vivid colour and sumptuous detail. A fist-faced brute, in draped pantaloons (chalwar) and pointy-toed slippers (babouche), but with a baseball cap in place of a turban, and with a football guernsey emblazoned 'Champion', lurches toward a prone woman - pushed to the floor, hands at her throat, as another man, crew cut and sculpted facial hair, grips her by the hair and neck. Women appear elsewhere in Champion, forced upon their knees, forced to tears, lying on the rough ground. A group of men congregate outside a small building - part brick veneer, part arabesque cupola - we later recognise it as a toilet block. A woman lies, dishevelled, distressed, at the men's feet - she is, as she will be identified in court proceedings, 'Miss C', raped twenty-five times over six hours. C is represented again in Champion, by a horse and cart that symbolise the Bankstown Trotting Club, where her ordeal continued, and by the woman, face in hands, standing, improbably, under a hose pipe. After the attacks C was blasted with a fire hose.

In focusing on such details, Hilton has eschewed the headlines and the outraged op-eds, and has instead taken as his source material the more than thirty court transcripts which bloodlessly document these crimes, the sentencing of the perpetrators, the appeals, the retrials. It is a gruelling and heartbreaking process - one heightened by Hilton's own painstaking methods, with each double-sided lightbox requiring more than 100 pencil drawings, each drawing digitally scanned and individually coloured. The laborious process necessitates a 'slowing down' - as the artist describes it, a period that gives him time to ask of himself 'why am I drawn to this subject matter - to tragedy, conflict and difference?' He has no ready answers, but points to a wider interest in the intersection of fact and fiction; to the fancy that close study might uncover some essential truth, that compulsive rendering can make sense of insensible acts.

A recent work, Infiltration of the rhetorical by the real, 2006, reproduced on the back cover of Art & Australia, returns us to this murky ground. A sculptural project utilising a well-worn Goodyear bus tyre, upon which - in another example of exacting method - Hilton has carved scenes from the passion, Infiltration is a strong and engaged statement on the vagaries of fortune and on the role of religion in contemporary culture. Here, as distinguished from the lightbox works, we are impelled not to focus on or to judge the actions of others, but instead to examine our own precarious moral compass. The wheel of fortune turns, Christ soars above, Dysmas, the penitent thief, rises on Christ's right, and Gestas, the impenitent, descends on his left. Intrigued by the central role allotted to fate - to Fortune's Wheel - in crucifixion imagery of the middle ages and, in particular, to the woodblocks and paintings of the fifteenth-century Bavarian artist Lucas Cranach the Elder, Hilton reminds us that it is a wheel's - a humble tyre's - vocation to turn. What goes up necessarily comes down. So too do we move from darkness toward the light; and from the light we descend into darkness