For Jessica Taylor Bellamy, juxtapositions, transparency, and layers form a means of working that evokes her household historical past and notions of residence and panorama. Born to an Ashkenazi Jewish mom and an Afro-Cuban Jamaican father, Bellamy was raised in Whittier, simply southeast of Los Angeles.
In glowing oil work, she attracts from private mementos like images, gross sales receipts, and newspaper clippings to discover the relationships between utopia and dystopia, people and nature, picture and textual content, and fantasy and actuality.
Bellamy portrays sunsets, landscapes, bushes, city streets, flora, animals, and cloud formations in a form of dreamy washiness, including patterns like chainlink fences, gates, and lace curtains suggestive of boundaries. Horizontal landscapes overlaid with American Airways tickets echo Andy Warhol’s Sixties 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 an announcement from Anat Ebgi, which represents the artist and opens her new solo exhibition, Temperature Verify.
A couple of works proven right here, like “Did She Nail It?,” seem within the present, which merges landscapes and atmospheric lighting results with references to DIY tradition, what’s gendered as “men’s work,” and automotive and motorbike tradition. The Dwelling Depot receipt, which generally makes use of the slogan “Did we nail it?,” is mixed with a picture of a rear-view mirror depicted so shut that it initially seems summary.
Bellamy examines the dualities and precarity of life in Southern California—a seeming paradise we’ve witnessed will be swiftly devastated by fireplace and drought. The title Temperature Change can also be a double entendre, suggesting meteorological readings and a figurative expression used when measuring a gaggle temper or opinion. By surreal imagery and echoes of mass manufacturing and consumerism, the artist invokes a noir reverie.
Temperature Verify runs from February 8 to March 22 in Los Angeles. Discover extra on the artist’s web site and Instagram.
