Irene Previn’s collage ensembles invite us into a surrealist world tinged with humour and subtle mystery. Previn’s vintage-inspired designs that present a strategic mash-up of picture-perfect children, flowers and animals from retro greeting cards, spliced with uncanny visual interludes.

These recurring motifs include the classic nineteen-fifties UFO, often hovering in the corner, floating octopuses or the disembodied bust of the Virgin Mary. Most objects are superimposed over other-worldly land or ocean-scapes or floating atop stark geographic rock formations.

The collages are constructed by careful selection of found analogue illustrations combined with digital photographs, taken by the artist herself. These are then strategically arranged and manipulated to create a series of dream-like visual narratives that operate on two key registers. Firstly, the playful re-interpretation of the rather saccharine nostalgia and added oddities is achieved by the mixup of images, styles and fantastical use of colour. Secondly, and more conceptually, Previn’s uncanny selection and placement of imagery display more subversive and cryptic commentary at play.

The art of modern collage dates back to Dada and the European Avant-garde of the early twentieth century. It is this Dadaist spirit that Previn’s work aligns with – namely, a clever application of art and design to draw on audiences’ understanding of popular media whilst introducing new meaning. In her vintage collages, for instance, the Virgin Mary that appears in many of the works cultivates complex weighty association with this powerful female icon, while also alluding to faith (for good or bad) in the divine.

Other repeated imagery Previn uses further contrast against the seemingly benign greeting card lightness of butterflies and flowers. The octopus, suggestive of mysterious evolutionary intelligence, the mushroom with its hallucinogenic ability to reveal alternate planes of consciousness, and the UFO as shorthand for alien intelligence, like religion, are each predicated on the faith of, and the desire to know, the unknown. Such subjects also function as a visual questioning of what is culturally inculcated as rational vs the irrational, what is socially acceptable and what is not, the benign vs the sinister.

These concepts in turn connect to works such as Rejoice. In Rejoice, a smiling pigtailed girl is depicted looking to her hand, which Previn has artistically added a smear of blood to. As the title suggests, and the wreaths of roses around the girl metaphorically allude to, Ms Pigtails, happily, has her period. With this visual interjection, the innocuous aura of nineteen-fifties greeting card imagery that reinforces Western preoccupation with edifying female virginal (pre-pubescent) innocence and purity, is neatly punked.    

Previn's body of photographic-based collage work, Genitalic, takes an even more politically overt, yet equally parodic tone. On first glance, the black and white photographs look to be a series of stark, graphic landscapes. On closer inspection, we see rising from the grass as odd flower growths or dangling as stalactites, large, erect penises complete with sizeable balls.

Such a comedic premise is at once humorously disarming (emphasised further by titles such as After Wood, Obelisk, and Wet Dream) and critically transgressive. In these phallic collaged landscapes, an inversion of power relating to the phallus as a signifier of social order is evident. By situating the penis out of its traditional context (attached to a body) the imagery sets up an absurdist recontextualising, and the phallus loses its potency and weaponised power in association with patriarchal dominance.

Genitalic as a series in this sense functions to draw attention to the historical oppression of society's ‘abject other’ including women, as well as colonised people and their country. Through theft of unceded land, colonising patriarchy has sought to control, ‘penetrate’ and subdue the exotic and other as if a wild, unruly woman. The inversion of the penis as a subject and object in Previn's imagery, however, means that it is the phallus itself that, whilst re-positioned as part of the landscape, becomes the abject other within it. Subversion of traditional order hence also offers the scopophilic pleasure of gazing on the male member with sexual delight and amusement.

Previn’s art treads a careful path between the whimsical, surreal and satirically critical. From psychedelic green puppies to flowering geologic landscapes, we are invited into this world to bask in its visual wonder, and reflect on the conceptual mosaic that it cleverly reveals. 

Dr Mimi Kelly