Lee "Scratch" Perry | Mirror Master Futures Yard

The show will feature a newly commissioned sculptural installation, as well as works produced in Perry’s legendary Black Ark studio in Kingston, Jamaica in the late 1990’s and in his Blue Ark studio in Einsiedel, Switzerland, where he now lives.

Lee “Scratch” Perry is renowned for his pioneering role in the development of reggae and dub music, along with his spectacular presence as a self-proclaimed prophet donning mirror-jeweled hats and painted boots lined with bible pages. 

Ever since he hand-painted stripes onto newly-produced Heart of the Congos record covers in 1977, Perry’s artistic output has gradually developed into a multidisciplinary practice.

The walls of the gallery at SI feature works and pictorial material from Perry’s studios, where a collection of images has accumulated over time into a Byzantine patchwork of symbols and signs.

Characteristic of Perry’s Gesamtkunstwerk style, figurines of the Black Madonna of the rural alpine Abbey of Einsiedeln are placed among laptop computers, printed out stacks of poetry, dug-up notebooks, mirror balls and CDs, along with a plethora of other materials. 

Deeply influenced by a fusion of religious beliefs and practices, including the Yoruba tradition of Ettu, Obeah, Rastafarianism, and Christianity, Perry transforms these materials by burning, painting, layering, collaging, gluing, exposing to sun, wind and rain, and burying. 

In this way, Perry incorporates them into a never-complete artistic cosmos untethered from notions of linear space and time.