Jessica Taylor Bellamy: Temperature Check

Anat Ebgi is delighted to present Temperature Check, an exhibition by Los Angeles artist Jessica Taylor Bellamy. This is Bellamy’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and debuts new paintings and sculptures. On view at 6150 Wilshire Blvd from February 8 to March 22. An opening reception will take place on Saturday, February 8 from 6-8 pm.

Jessica Taylor Bellamy’s complexly layered works for Temperature Check unify multiple visual languages and source materials. Drawing from personal photographs to newspapers, several works also incorporate intricately embedded video elements, to explore politics of climate change and disaster. 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.

Throughout the exhibition, Bellamy draws parallels between her own body and the anatomy of machines, particularly cars or power tools. A trio of paintings, Miss Fix It, individually subtitled (Ambition), (Courage), and (Modesty) riff on Warhol’s triple portrait of Elvis Presley. Equipped with a tool belt and drill, confidently posed—the work is a call to action; it speaks to ideas of preparedness, foundations, and having what it takes to get a job done. Repeating the cropped figure (a stand-in for the artist) across multiple works, Bellamy toys with ideas of progress and variation through changing grounds—sunset at the beach, a field of wildflowers, and a pattern of woven sheets of weather forecasts and daily headlines. In the hybrid painting-with-video titled Foliage Gas Pump, Bellamy examines interrelated structures of commerce and natural resources, an absurdist reimagining of human impact within fragile ecosystems. 

The exhibition revisits Bellamy’s interest in driving and car culture, as a symbol of Los Angeles and metaphor for the body; simultaneously she unfolds a feminine takeover of ‘the body shop’ or construction zone, softening them into fantasy. In the sculpture Mantis, a praying mantis ‘rider’ and its machine exoskeleton become one. The lifesized insecto-cyle emerges from the gallery floor and exemplifies her hybrid approach. In the adjacent gallery, two small screens embedded into passenger side mirror-sculptures cut between sequences of original video: scenes of driving westward into darkness, oil on glass animations, botox injection procedures, and the artist smearing bondo on her face like a mud-mask. These are soundtracked by an ambient roar of the ocean and the incessant purr of the artist’s cat. 

Washed and brushy, Bellamy depicts sunsets, shorelines, trees, flora, atmospheric skies and cloud formations. These are juxtaposed with boundaries and barriers that appear as soft lace curtains or harsh iron gates and chainlink fences. Carefully composed newsprint silkscreens combine crisp word and image. Attentive to language, Bellamy’s titles vary from tongue-in-cheek, Did she nail it?, to probing poetics of Pyrocumulus Daisy Portal. The exhibition title, Temperature Check, also carries a double-meaning as both a key element of weather readings, or as a figurative expression to measure the mood or opinion of a group, ultimately emphasizing the surreal reality produced through language and distribution of mass media imagery. Bellamy’s paintings thrust viewers forward, armed with hope to face uncertain times.

Jessica Taylor Bellamy (b. 1992, Whittier, CA) received an MFA from the Roski School of Art at the University of Southern California in 2022 and a BA in Political Science from the University of Southern California in 2014. Bellamy’s work has been featured in exhibitions with Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York; UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles, CA; GRIMM, New York, NY; Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Make Room LA, Los Angeles, CA; Superposition Gallery hosted at Ochi Aux, Los Angeles, CA; and Lyles and King Gallery, New York, NY. Bellamy is the recipient of artist grants from Los Angeles Lakers sponsored ‘In the Paint’ art program 2024-25 and LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) Lighting Fund 2025. Bellamy lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.