Jessica Taylor Bellamy: Present Myth, Future Fantasy

Jessica Taylor Bellamy
MFA Thesis Exhibition
On view May 5 – 14, 2022
Opening Reception: May 6, 7pm

USC Roski Graduate Gallery
1262 Palmetto Street, LA
Los Angeles Arts District

Click here to RSVP for the opening reception on Friday, May 6th

Gallery hours: Tuesday – Sunday; 12noon – 5pm
Additional hours are available by appointment; make an appointment by clicking here or email directly at jbellamy@usc.edu

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Los Angeles-based artist Jessica Taylor Bellamy explores the tension of living at the edge of a precarious paradise. Primarily working with oil painting, Bellamy also incorporates screen printing, animation, and video installation into her practice. Her work functions as collages that intend to deconstruct idealist narratives by exploring the political, social, and ecological implications of a false promise of paradise and false notions of progress. Through a critical and loving approach, Bellamy examines the phenomenological experience of the California landscape and proposes that we reimagine our relationship to the environment and examine the social structures that strain it. Bellamy creates layered compositions of overlapping and intersecting representations of culture, history, plant species, and sun phases that result in dream-like narratives or windows that give form and visibility to unseen or alternative possibilities.

This exhibition is curated in collaboration with Lauren Guilford, writer, curator, and art historian based in Los Angeles. She is a candidate in the USC Roski Masters in Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere Program.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Jessica Taylor Bellamy is a multidisciplinary artist working in painting and video. Guided by eco-phenomenology, Bellamy considers the shifting ecology of Los Angeles and the devastating effects of climate change—fire season (heat and drought), pollution, environmental racism (the politics of shade). Her thesis exhibition, Present Myth, Future Fantasy, opens in May 2022 and features painting, video, and sculpture, exploring themes of utopia><dystopia, human><nature, fantasy><reality and the collapsing of time in Los Angeles.

She was born in Whittier, CA, and received a B.A. in Political Science from USC in 2014. Jessica’s work has been featured in exhibitions with UTA Artist Space (2020), WOAW Gallery Hong Kong and Make Room LA (2021). Currently, Bellamy has a solo exhibition, Tender Haze, Curtain of Sky at Superposition Gallery at Ochi Aux space in Los Angeles, and upcoming in summer 2022, her work will be included in What a Tale Their Terror Tells at Lyles and King Gallery, New York.

More @jbellzamy

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