The Red Bulletin April 2020 (US)

Fashion made it possible to do that. “The fashion
world is corporate. But I think why I like fashion
people is they definitely set the tone,” he points out.
“Fashion has the people with the open minds, and I
knew I wanted to be around open-minded people.”
And yet while fashion offered Smith room to
wiggle within an expanded worldview, it also
presented clear problems. The seeds of No Gyal Can
Test were planted a decade ago, when he saw an
editorial in a fashion magazine that made him
bristle. The story was intended as a reflection on
dancehall style and culture. But to Smith’s expert
eyes, the inaccuracies were clear, and dangerous.
They posed a problem for posterity, and for the
broader culture the piece incorrectly invoked.
“If someone gets that magazine in 10 years, it’s
far gone from what dancehall is. People are going
to think this is what it is,” says Smith. “And it got to
that whole erasure of culture. It struck that chord,
so I was like, I was destined to do something to
represent it accurately.”
Just outside Smith’s makeshift workspace is an
ad-hoc Kingston cityscape. The bright, whitewalled
space has been conquered by a newly
arrived shipment of materials he hand-selected on
a recent trip to Jamaica. Faded doors, corrugated
tin, scraps of all kinds lie in piles. Some, he says,
are from the remnants of his grandmother’s club.
Others were sourced in and around his childhood
neighborhood, objects that resonated with him for
one reason or another and that he is tasked with
turning into the structures that will anchor the show.
“I want to confront how people view images.
Some people do need to see certain things like
a frame in order to give it [meaning]. But I’m
somewhat challenging that. I’m so into
deprogramming people. Like, why do I think this
is cool? Because it’s in this frame on this wall?”
He’s careful to point out that he didn’t simply
take the items. He is concerned with ethically
procuring materials. That exchange is as much a part
of the piece as the objects themselves, a corrective in
the balance of power that often characterizes projects
of this nature. A similar ethos guided his acquisition
of a growing dancehall archive, including a trove
bequeathed from the Ouch family.
A few years after he decided to help archive and
preserve the history of his childhood, Smith went
to Jamaica to link up with a family friend, Photo
Morris, who had been tasked with documenting his
grandmother’s parties in their heyday. “He’s the one
that used to take most of the photos,” recalls Smith.
He was heartbroken to discover that Photo Morris
had been in a car crash that left him disabled from
the waist down and living in “squalor.” Smith began
to help out financially, eventually buying negatives
of Photo Morris’s work. “I was like, ‘Forget the prints.
Let me rescue the negatives.’ ” Soon he connected
with other family friends—photographers and
videographers who had between them amassed
years’ worth of dancehall documentation—and
began accumulating material. “They didn’t
understand [what I was doing] but they definitely
trusted me. They led on blind faith,” says Smith.
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