WHAT DO WB Yeats, Angelina Jolie, Lauren Bacall and images of 9/11 have in common?

They all feature in a controversial new show of artworks by artist Sean Hillen, exhibited just down the road from Leinster House. The show, What’s Wrong? with The Consolation of Genius, opens today at the Oliver Sears Gallery on Molesworth Street in the centre of Dublin.

Hillen received a lot of exposure for his previous exhibition Irelantis, a collection of collages which pasted postcard images together to create a fantastical new Ireland. They were intended to “mirror the swollen angst and fantasy of Celtic Tiger Ireland”. He has also made politically-inspired photomontages based on the Troubles in Northern Ireland, where he grew up.

This new exhibition, according to the gallery promo, “uses images from the 9/11 atrocities, major Irish literary figures and scantily-clad beauties to create a picture of a new paradigm, one where nothing seems to be reliable or certain”.

Nothing “reliable or certain” within stone’s throw distance of government buildings? What could that mean?

Here are some of the images on display from today until March 10 at the Oliver Sears Gallery. The final image is from his Irelantis exhibition: