Jessica Taylor Bellamy Paints a Surreal Portrait of LA Car Culture in 'Temperature Check'
Works that put the “body” in “body shop.”
Art’s love for cars is certainly no secret. From Daniel Arsham’s latest Arsham Motorsport to the late Pippa Garner’s seminal Karmann sculpture, both art and the automotive serve as prime vehicles for ideas of progress, technology and desire. Now, at Anat Ebgi gallery in Los Angeles, American artist Jessica Taylor Bellamy presents her own take on the connection in Temperature Check, a new solo exhibition of paintings and sculptures.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Bellamy surveys driving and car culture as a symbol of her city, putting her own fantastical spin to the conventional “body shop”: at the heart of the gallery, a striking Mantis “insecto-cycle” emerges from the ground; while in Objects in Mirror figures two screens fixed inside passenger side-mirror sculptures play a sequence of driving scenes, oil on glass animations, botox injection procedures and clips of the artist applying mud-masks made of bondo.
Moving into the gallery, Bellamy continues her affinity with the mechanic, expanding into the realm of power tools. In tightly-cropped capture, the Miss Fix It trio probes ideas of progress through surreal, layered compositions. Equipped with a tool and drill, each iteration speaks to themes of ambition, courage and modesty through shifting backgrounds of wildflower fields and latticed news headlines.
Drawing from personal and collective ephemera, Bellamy channels the motion and speed of an ever-changing Los Angeles in the face of the climate crisis, presenting a “meeting of nature and civilization at the edge of a precarious paradise, formed by fire, drought, flood and wind,” the gallery wrote. “Bellamy’s paintings thrust viewers forward, armed with hope to face uncertain times.”
Temperature Check is now on view in Los Angeles through March 22.
Anat Ebgi Wilshire
6150 Wilshire Blvd #5,
Los Angeles, CA 90048
