Jessica taylor Bellamy

Candidate 2022 MFA Art, USC Roski School of Art and Design, Los Angeles

2014 BA Political Science, University of Southern California, Los Angeles

Jessica’s work explores the tension of living at the edge of a tenuous paradise. Predominantly an oil painter, Bellamy also blends screen printing, animation, and image transfer into her work, 

seeking to deconstruct idealist narratives by exploring the political, social, and ecological implications of this promise of paradise. Jessica both critically and lovingly examines the phenomenological experience of the California landscape, ultimately proposing that we reimagine our relationship to the environment and the social structures that strain it. The layered compositions that result are dream-like narratives, a window giving form to unseen or alternative possibilities. Bellamy uses recurring motifs including freeways signage, bouquets, the poppy, and palm tree. These motifs are combined with collected data —the sunrise, sunset, and moon phases and temperature charts, even oral histories of her Afro-Cuban immigrant family—a research practice remediated and layered back into art. 

 “As I explore and define my perspective as a mixed-race millennial woman, I use the familiarity of Southern California landscapes and aesthetics to connect shared visual references with the mood of chaotic unrest that is undeniable in our shared historical moment. My paintings present an intensified view of contemporary life that wavers between idealism and existential ambivalence and the identity of a place.”