JESSICA TAYLOR BELLAMY

Jessica Taylor Bellamy employs elements of surrealism and pop art, composing dreamy images from fragments of mass-media clipped from newspapers, bureaucratic documents, mail, along with personal identity markers such as signatures, private letters, and fingerprints. These are layered together with hand painted imagery of luminous skylines, sunsets, and cloud formations. Working through what she describes as “trying to bridge a distance,” Bellamy’s hybrid approach examines archives and memory through their circulating physical material—keepsakes, paperwork, and photographs. Her work collapses hierarchies between thematic motifs: the mundane, the life-changing, the disposable, the human, and the symbolic within the same fuzzy field of information.

Paper operates as a connecting line between fragility, nostalgia, and intimacy. Mining her growing archive of ephemera—newspapers, mail, handwritten notes, personal letters, checks, envelopes, diaries—Bellamy cuts, photographs, and rearranges, to create large-scale silkscreens. The screen-printed elements are then carefully layered over hand-painted passages. Each part of her paintings are rendered in oil, including the silkscreens, for which Bellamy thins her paint to an ink-like viscosity to pass through the fine mesh screen. The resulting paintings are thoughtful combinations of collaged silkscreened imagery over underpainting and layered glazes of fully rendered luminous skyscapes, where documentary fragments poetically interpose against atmospheric scenes.

Bellamy attends to multiple meanings of “mark making” and “leaving a mark,” from the fingerprint and stamp in Forever and the floral tire tread in Wheel of Fortune: Dizzy, to the process of silkscreening, the allowance for misregistrations, and brush-to-canvas painted mark itself. She collapses multiple distinctions: between mass media and personal or private information, between mechanical reproduction and hand-painted gesture, and between depiction and representation. Viewers look through, around, and against veils of language and data as these hybrid surfaces accumulate idyllic light and textual residue; context is embedded and estranged through her process of layering, transfer, and painterly revision.

Memory is a layered field. In Forget-me-not, Bellamy overlays painted and green blossoms with silkscreened pages of a letter typed by her grandfather, recording memories of surviving the pograms in Odessa in 1905. Other works incorporate diary entries, her father’s fingerprint from his Resident Alien card, an “Original Document” stamp, and the “Sorry I missed you” hanger, each are markers of a life and sites where memory is recorded and remade. The tangibility of these recorded memories is softened through her layering, reaching into the world of dreams. The implications of movement—the wheel turning, a door unlocking, horizons shifting—suggest that time rolls on marking each of us. The exhibition title, Semblance connotes an outward similarity—a veneer or apparent form that resembles what is expected, while the underlying reality remains different. Bellamy’s work operates within this tension between appearance and actuality, where images carry layered and altered meanings.

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. Her work has been featured in exhibitions with Benton Museum of Art, Claremont, CA; 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. Her work is in the permanent collection of the California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA. Bellamy lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.