Insanity Fair

Vanity of vanities. All is vanity.

Insanity Fair drew together a body of work made between 2013 and 2018, while Zoobs was living in New York and Los Angeles. The exhibition explores the allure of fame, celebrity culture, and the disillusionment that follows when success disappoints or dreams do not come true. It is equally an expression of the artist's own fear of death and obscurity.

Zoobs's fascination with celebrity began in childhood. Born to Pakistani immigrant parents, the loss of his father at the age of eight added the loneliness of bereavement to the isolation of difference. He found solace in drawing pop stars ~ Blondie, Madonna, the girls in ABBA ~ and in television programmes such as Dallas and Dynasty, which offered a window onto an alternative existence of glittering lives, big blue skies and the golden glow of the always shining sun.

As a student of graphic design and photography at Kingston University, and later as an apprentice to image-maker Serge Lutens at Shiseido in Tokyo, Zoobs discovered the power of make-up, hair, styling and lighting to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. "I often found it a welcome challenge to immortalize anyone who asked me to be photographed, and presented to them a version of themselves which they loved, and I did so with pleasure."

There is a serpent in every Eden. Lost to the fruitless pursuit of "silver screen quotation," faces deformed by unsuccessful attempts to preserve youthful beauty, values compromised by relentless ambition or desperation ~ Vanity Fair becomes Insanity Fair. The exhibition also marked Zoobs's first video works, made with Serge Lutens's theatrical approach to the photographic shoot in mind: a series of video portraits in which transformation from ordinary to extraordinary is revealed from the first touch of make-up to the final flowering of a confident, expressive performance.

It started with a death. An eight-year-old boy loses his father. A child learns the permanence of absence, and absence becomes a presence that he will carry with him forever.

Text by Jenny Christensson, exhibition curator. Published by Elephant West.