Jessica Taylor Bellamy’s Captured Realities Are Never Fully What They Seem

Artist Jessica Taylor Bellamy builds her paintings the way cities accumulate meaning—in layers, through collision and contradiction. Mass-media fragments, bureaucratic documents and newspapers press up against personal mail, signatures, private letters and fingerprints, creating compositions as oversaturated and heterogeneous as urban life itself. Personal and collective narratives coexist without resolving, while the saturated gradients and color choices of these dense sociological landscapes locate us immediately in Los Angeles, the city where Bellamy lives. Oscillating between utopia and dystopia—both a surreal contemporary idyll and apocalyptic vision—the Los Angeles portrayed in these works is approached by Bellamy as both a setting and a conceptual framework. Her L.A. is a precarious paradise of multicultural sprawl and shifting ecological collapse, reflecting tensions humanity is grappling with more broadly.

Interrogating the false promise of progress and exposing the instability beneath Southern California’s mythologies, Bellamy’s practice has long centered ecological collapse and climate anxiety, filtered through lived, hyper-local observation. In her soon-to-close exhibition, “Semblance,” at Anat Ebgi New York, the artist hits a more sentimental, domestic and intimate register. Where her previous works were largely informed by the sensory and symbolic density of Los Angeles—its visual cacophony and historical strata—this new body of work considers the tension between personal and collective frameworks, particularly as felt in a time of societal alienation and fragmentation, when all sense of history, identity and belonging seems to be under threat. Drawing more directly from family archives and memory for these new, seductive and destabilizing collages, Bellamy embarks on a deeper interrogation of her mixed heritage—Afro-Cuban and Ashkenazi Jewish—exploring notions of home and homeland, diasporic identity and the idea of landscape as both physical and psychological space to inhabit and read.

Speaking with Observer after the show’s opening, Bellamy pointed to two works, Forever and Just Missed You, as the anchors of the exhibition’s initial direction. The first depicts an envelope whose surface presents a variegated composition layering a delicate rose branch over a glowing, atmospheric landscape punctuated by power lines and silhouetted structures. The rose came from her garden, she explains—one she was trying to kill but which kept growing back, accidentally watered. Graphic marks and fragments of text interrupt the flow of the image plane, creating interwoven traces of hand-marking and screen-like overlays that converge without resolving. “I have always saved cards from people; it’s getting to be a bit of a problem. I love the security patterns in envelopes with sensitive documents,” Bellamy said, explaining how the text ‘don’t bend photo’ is in her grandmother’s handwriting and the Forever stamp carries her Havana-born father’s fingerprint, pulled from his resident alien card. “Rose keeps growing, handwriting remains, and fingerprint is forever,” she wrote in poetic notes accompanying the work.

In Just Missed You, a hyperreal close-up shows a hand inserting a key into a polished brass door lock, set against a saturated, almost apocalyptic sunset where a distant city skyline dissolves into a haze of red and orange. A dangling “Sorry I Missed You” notice introduces, through the semiotic register of the written word, a narrative of absence, delay and missed connection that inflects the final reading of this image of the threshold between interior and exterior or presence and absence. “What I’ve always wanted to do in my previous work, which was much more Los Angeles-based or even more landscape-based in a strange way, is to get the point across through more allegorical, figurative references,” Bellamy reflected. “Certain things just kept coming up as points of interest for me. I think, as an artist, you really have to pay attention to what you’re gravitating toward.” Those points of interest become the clues driving the work while also prompting a deeper inquiry into the self to access something more subconscious.

The objects that continuously appear in her work are often tinged with obsolescence, operating as devices for collapsing time—a condition she identifies as central to painting itself. “There are certain motifs—the door, the letter, the wheel—that are good examples of things you can literally use to think about transition or cycles, or about reaching back, almost like calling,” she observed, explaining how painting becomes for her both a temporal compression and a meditative process as she works through the gradual resolution of visual and conceptual puzzles.

This tension between personal memory and public imagery becomes even more evident as the two collide without fully resolving, as so often happens in our increasingly complex relationship to the present and to a recent past whose memory and narration have been shaped and mediated by time. Bellamy unpacks the relation between reality and fiction, between what is revealed and what is withheld or removed, and how this influences the final reading we give to an image and the event it conveys.

Just Missed You, Bellamy explained, began with staged, autobiographical scenes—her own hand opening her front door and a delivery tag altered from “we missed you” to “I missed you”—before being disrupted by overlays such as the New York skyline that introduce a dreamlike slippage between lived reality and constructed image as different times and spaces collapse within the same visual field. “Everything still comes from reality; I take the photos myself so it’s based on something that exists. Even the rose, the hose, the sunset and the envelope are all different images from my life at different times, kind of collapsed onto each other.”

From there, she proceeds with painting. In translating images onto canvas, Bellamy first builds the composition through a traditional grisaille technique, developing the entire tonal structure in monochrome before glazing in color—a method she describes as essential to achieving the paintings’ particular luminosity. “You can almost spotlight reality more than a camera can—especially in terms of color, like how a certain magical hour is perceived,” she said. Conceptually and symbolically, her process echoes how dreams and memory appear to function, prioritizing meaning and structure over full sensory fidelity.

This painterly foundation is interrupted by silkscreened elements, conceived separately in black and white and applied in a single pass, collapsing distinctions between painting and printmaking, between mechanical reproduction and hand-painted gesture. “It’s like two image systems coming together: what’s being painted and what’s being printed,” according to Bellamy, who originally incorporated printing out of a desire to introduce dense layers of information into her paintings.

“I love the combination of a soft, brushed, human hand with a printed image that’s also imperfect—it’s not made on a machine or a press, it’s not on paper, it interacts with the texture of the oil. There’s this overlap between understanding light in painting and understanding light in printing, since I need light to burn the silkscreens,” she added. “The screen becomes almost like a veil or a window. It can obscure that magnetic pull you feel when you want to look closely at a painting. You can’t fully see what’s behind it. It’s also a device for deciding where to spotlight and where to obscure, almost like gates or bars—something that keeps things visible but out of reach.”

Macro history and micro narratives collapse in Stacked, where multiple references are layered together, including four repeated photographs from a newspaper showing the Crew Dragon (SpaceX’s manned flight) returning to Earth with spectators watching. The two silkscreened images depict capitol buildings—in Havana, Cuba, and Washington, D.C.—with a bra covering the latter’s pert, melon-shaped dome. The Havana capitol appears upside down and in free fall. What Bellamy describes as a “lava waterfall,” or falling stars, or even bombs, runs through the scene. The result is an extremely powerful image that feels unexpectedly timely given the current political context.

“I don’t know why seeing that capitol made me want to bring in the one from Cuba, but it felt like I was already prepared for it, like these images were waiting on the sidelines. I just saw this image in my head,” Bellamy explained, framing her work as emerging from a distinctly human impulse to construct meaning by linking disparate events and associations. “There’s this sense of things like great-grandfather, clairvoyance, these moments where you’re just noticing connections. It’s about how we as humans, even when we’re fully conscious—and not just when dreaming—try to string together events and images and create meaning, or a story. It’s that impulse to connect things, even when the connections aren’t immediately logical.”

Deeply personal materials surface across her work: the fingerprint taken from her father’s resident alien card reappears as a fragmentary trace in the work, echoing other documentary elements—checks, official records—embedded in other compositions. “I’ve always been drawn to text, devices like crosswords and newspapers, because they function like clues or games, things you can try to piece together,” she reflected, pointing out how in some works she intentionally introduced underlying phrases about debt, fire or stress—fragments that connect to the rest of the painting and eventually influence its reading. “It’s similar to the clairvoyance idea—how do you know what to look for, or what something means?” she continued, describing her paintings as puzzles that resist direct reading. “A painting with silkscreen becomes a puzzle I’ve constructed myself. I’m not trying to have people solve it; I just want them to notice things. Each part becomes like a small window.”

Different symbolic elements emerge almost from the edge of consciousness and can surface from any period in time, according to Bellamy. She acknowledged that this may relate to intergenerational trauma and how experiences are carried and resurface through that same consciousness. Art, in that sense, becomes part of the process of emergence, helping to situate our position within a broader personal and collective history.

Particularly interesting is how Bellamy combines painting and printed words as two distinct registers of experience: one aligned with interiority and subjective perception, the other with language, infrastructure and the collective sphere. In this way, her work collapses not only different temporalities—inner time and collective time—but also personal and shared histories into a single, unstable image field.

The printed elements she uses usually come from the public sphere, from the landscape or from a publication—something we might all encounter, if in different ways. The painted elements, by contrast, belong to her inner world. Often originating as digital collages—mirroring the mediated nature of the contemporary experience—her images are reintroduced into the physical world through manual intervention. Printed materials such as maps or texts are manipulated, photographed and reabsorbed in digital form, only to return through silkscreen onto the painted surface, materially demonstrating the endless mutability of images and narratives.

This dialectical approach is further extended in the video works presented in the exhibition. Installed in custom-built mirrored structures—3D-printed, cast and painted—these works expand Bellamy’s exploration of the relation between perception and emotional temporality. The upper, nonlinear video unfolds as a hypnotic loop, anchored by the sound of a cat’s purr and set against a continuous sunset, while the lower video adopts a more linear narrative drawn from her father’s childhood as a falconer after emigrating from Cuba to Inglewood.

It introduces an unexpected, almost mythic dimension to a narrative otherwise framed by migration and assimilation, revealing a latent strangeness within the everyday. Across both works, Bellamy returns to the motif of the mirror as a site of reflection and distortion, extending her exploration of memory, temporality and the coexistence of the ordinary and the surreal.

All the works in the exhibition originate from Bellamy’s recent questioning of whether her work can sustain meaning over time—whether gestures such as an opening door or a falling sky will remain legible in the future and how audiences might read them. Hers is a psychological and semiotic inquiry into the tension between depiction and representation, between what is accessible to perception and cognition and what remains beyond it, as well as into the role of images in communicating reality in an age of visual overexposure.

These latest works can be read as both an archive for cathartically elaborating on the recent past and a reflection of contemporary modes of perception and visual narration. The title of the show reveals its central tension: in philosophy and aesthetics, ‘semblance’ refers to something that appears real or coherent but is not fully what it seems—something constructed that carries meaning without being stable or fixed. In painting, this semblance is what enables open-ended recognition, allowing images to hover between meanings and triggering the imaginative processes through which we navigate symbols, memory and perception.

More in Artists

• Danielle Orchard’s Indescribable Yearning

• In L.A., Christina Quarles Confronts the Tension Between Body, Space and Identity

• Gabriel De La Mora’s Meditations On Matter and the Monochrome

• Davide Balliano’s Geometric Abstraction Sits at the Threshold of Precision and Entropy

• Mia Westerlund Roosen’s Ongoing Material Inquiry