Lee Scratch Perry didn’t just dub music, he dubbed the whole world. The Jamaican sound pioneer took sonic source material and twisted it into untold trippy new shapes. And he did it with his art too.
The works in this show are salvaged from his famous Black Ark studio in Jamaica – which he apocryphally burned to the ground in 1979 – and his later Blue Ark in Switzerland. The exhibition is exactly what you’d expect: a hectic tornado of found imagery, scrawled text and painted pictograms, all coalescing into a vibrant portrayal of how Perry’s brain worked.
There are canvases across the walls, plastered in pages from science books, nature magazines and Perry’s own gig posters. They’re covered in images of Haile Selassie and Stone Cold Steve Austin, Jesus and a whole bunch of chimpanzees. He’s painted teardrops around them, written ‘supremacy’, ‘birds war’ and – over and over – his own name.
These are stuttering, no-holds-barred collages filled with visual samples from music, culture, religion and the cult of Lee Scratch Perry. There are stones all across the floor, folders filled with articles about how Perry was an afrofuturist visionary. It’s a total mess, a collision of Basquiat, pop and reggae culture that barely marks sense. If it was by anyone else, it would seem contrived, but it’s not, it’s by the brilliant Lee Scratch Perry. This is a portrait of a singular, eccentric genius, and genius is rarely anything but untidy.
