HIJACKED 3

Life Through The Lens

Hijacked 3 opens at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art on Friday, February 17, as a part of the Perth International Arts Festival. Admission to the exhibition is free and extends until April 8. For more information visit pica.org.au, perthfestival.com.au.

Hijacked 3, the latest instalment of the Hijacked series from Big City Press founder Mark McPherson, invites the viewer to take a trip into the strange and surreal worlds of 24 photographers from both Australia and the UK. Coinciding with a simultaneous exhibition at the QUAD Gallery in the UK and the launch of an 400 page publication under the same name, this adventurous instalment documents photographers at the cutting edge of their field, exploring the wild and fantastic universes that belong to each artist.
Hijacked 3 co-curator Leigh Ross describes the exhibition as something particularly beautiful and different. “It’s quite a diverse selection of artists, so thematically there are always things that come out of it... they’re definitely incomplete anthologies or snapshots of some tendencies in photography at the moment going into the second decade of the 21st century.”
Featured amongst this exhibition is Melbourne artist Christopher Day. Day’s creation, The End, a digital collage exploring endings and end points, features images that range from sublime, to ridiculous, terrifying, and hilarious. “In many ways he’s looking at notions of apocalypse, but also end points, but also there’s whole a lot of... asses and ass-ends!” laughs Ross. “So he’s looking at really both the physical and philosophical ideas of end points, both corporeal, bodily, and otherwise imagined or feared. There’s sort of incredible collages that look like sort of great film posters for almost Antonioni films, but then they’re also quite pop culture. ”
UK artist Sarah Pickering will also have her work displayed in Hijacked 3. Startlingly beautiful and catastrophic, Pickering’s series Explosion captures fleeting moments of combustion, from the minuscule to the devastating. “They’re incredible because some of them look as elegant and ethereal as a sort of breath on the air, and others are huge violent explosions that she’s caught on her camera,” Ross says.
“Obviously there’s a real technical aspect to being able to capture these things which are fleeting and instantaneous and disperse immediately but are also both violent but incredibly beautiful.”
This incredible energy and diversity make Hijacked another stunning example of the quality of work on the Perth Festival line up this year. “The Perth Festival is both always internationally ambitious, in terms of the people it brings over, and diverse,”  says Robb. “I think with Hijacked, because it’s both Australia and the UK... there is something that does connect with the larger idea of the festival with being something that is ambitious and international but does have a certain amount of local authenticity which connects it with the community here.”

_LEAH BLANKENDAAL