Zam’s portrait work often features celebrated cultural figures; more recently whole images are constructed from thousands of tiny individual digital pieces.
His recent ‘Modern Girls, Modern Boys’ series has been a purely experimental exploration of a medium genre, and takes inspiration from happenstance collage such as the accumulation of street bill-posting and tagging.
The subjects, overlaid with clusters of collage fragments, and paint splashes and drips remain discernible; the random detritus creates a mysterious and slightly disturbing effect.
In particular this piece is also inspired by 1960s teen pop music and chart countdown TV shows, referencing teen dance clubs which catered to that market at the time, as well as the fictional Baltimore-based ‘Corny Collins Show’ in the original 1988 ‘Hairspray’ movie.
