Jessica Taylor Bellamy: Endnotes for Sunshine

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Endnotes for Sunshine, a solo exhibition by Jessica Taylor Bellamy on view at 6150 Wilshire Blvd, January 21 – February 25, 2023. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. An opening reception will take place Saturday, January 21 from 5 – 8pm.

Jessica Taylor Bellamy is an artist of juxtapositions: image and text, abstraction and figuration, handmade and mass produced, reality and fantasy, sunshine and noir. A native Angeleno, born and raised in Whittier to an Ashkenazi Jewish mother and an Afro-Cuban father, Bellamy’s practice considers this particular familial history to address notions of home, homeland, and landscape. The artist’s work is rooted in her observations living at the edge of a precarious paradise of shifting ecological tensions.

Bellamy’s multi-layered imagery culls from personal archives of information including newspapers, photographs, and videos. The video-sculpture In view, if not in reach (2023), exemplifies her hybrid approach. Comprising a hand-painted animation of vanity plates layered over video footage of westward drives at sunset, the film loops on a license-plate sized monitor attached to a flaming motorcycle fender. Endnotes for Sunshine draws from the artist’s familial and relational experiences of the California landscape as a way to reimagine our relationship to the environment and examine the structures that strain it.

Engaging with the rich art history of Los Angeles, Bellamy’s work is informed by artists such as Ed Ruscha and Mark Bradford—through a love of place and conceptual process to art making. Although nature informs her somatic color palette, she also borrows imagery from The Los Angeles Times, understanding the newspaper as a chronicler of daily geopolitical and local stories, tragedies, human interest, weather, and trends in culture—a semiotic political thermometer that marks the passage of time.

For her paintings, Bellamy cuts, scrunches, slices, dissects, and rearranges the newsprint which is then rephotographed and converted into large-scale silkscreens. This labor-intensive process includes transferring the images to canvas with oil paint. Everything about Bellamy’s use of silkscreen is unconventional—including her intentional misregistrations. What results is an absurdist and found poetry superimposed over her softly rendered palms and sundrenched horizons.

Throughout the exhibition, considered mashups of words and images lead to provocative and humorous new meanings that point to the absurdity of our times and address a pervasive sense of reality upturned. In moments when the text is most abstracted, one’s mind wanders to the declining popularity of print media and how quickly the day’s news is discarded for secondary uses, for kindling, or washing windows, or the irony of wrapping a bouquet of fresh flowers in war reportage.

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 California in 2014. Her work has been featured in exhibitions with UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles, CA; WOAW Gallery Hong Kong and Make Room LA; Superposition Gallery hosted at Ochi Aux, Los Angeles, CA; and Lyles and King Gallery, New York, NY. Bellamy lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.