For Jessica Taylor Bellamy, juxtapositions, transparency, and layers shape a way of working that evokes her family history and notions of home and landscape. Born to an Ashkenazi Jewish mother and an Afro-Cuban Jamaican father, Bellamy was raised in Whittier, just southeast of Los Angeles.
In glowing oil paintings, she draws from personal mementos like photographs, sales receipts, and newspaper clippings to explore the relationships between utopia and dystopia, humans and nature, image and text, and fantasy and reality.
Bellamy portrays sunsets, landscapes, trees, urban streets, flora, animals, and cloud formations in a kind of dreamy washiness, adding patterns like chainlink fences, gates, and lace curtains suggestive of boundaries. Horizontal landscapes overlaid with American Airlines tickets echo Andy Warhol’s 1960s silkscreen prints of SAS airline tickets merged with floral motifs.
“Bellamy’s observations are rooted in her experiences of the sprawling urban landscape of Los Angeles—a meeting of nature and civilization at the edge of a precarious paradise, formed by fire, drought, flood, and wind,” says a statement from Anat Ebgi, which represents the artist and opens her new solo exhibition, Temperature Check.
A few works shown here, like “Did She Nail It?,” appear in the show, which merges landscapes and atmospheric lighting effects with references to DIY culture, what’s gendered as “men’s work,” and car and motorcycle culture. The Home Depot receipt, which typically uses the slogan “Did we nail it?,” is combined with an image of a rear-view mirror depicted so close that it initially appears abstract.
Bellamy examines the dualities and precarity of life in Southern California—a seeming paradise we’ve witnessed can be swiftly devastated by fire and drought. The title Temperature Change is also a double entendre, suggesting meteorological readings and a figurative expression used when measuring a group mood or opinion. Through surreal imagery and echoes of mass production and consumerism, the artist invokes a noir reverie.
Temperature Check runs from February 8 to March 22 in Los Angeles. Find more on the artist’s website and Instagram.
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