Jessica Taylor Bellamy cut out and collected weather maps from the local LA Times newspaper for three years. Through time, those archives displayed clear evidence of global warming. They also allowed her to discover the moon cycles, the changes in tides, and the exact times when the sun rose and set in her region, “like a rainbow palette, the maps are so beautiful,” Bellamy says. Born in a multi-generational LA home with an Ashkenazi Jewish mother and an Afro-Cuban Jamaican father, Bellamy, who studied political science and wanted to be a lawyer, worked in journalism until art made its calling. Her works and video sculptures, at times, capture the dimming light of a daunting, sometimes weary sunset, which she has chased endlessly, sometimes obsessively. Her process involves capturing those UV rays, those “blades of light,” as she calls them, in her paintings and silk screens. 

Bellamy mixes fantasy and reality to address notions of home, homeland, and landscape. " A lot of my work comes from wanting to collect what’s around me,” she expressed. “This includes fFigures, data, sunsets, and how information is presented in a newspaper.” 

However, the newspaper is only a door, a way to frame her broader ideas. Bellamy’s ability to manipulate realities by adding dystopian and paradisiacal motifs or replacing elements to create her own visions is at the center of her creative strength. Her technique includes both journalistic and artistic skills. The pieces for her 2023 show Vanities Come to Dust: From Havana to Los Angeles with Love at David Maxuel Gallery in LA were created after she visited Cuba in 2022. In those works, she captured the nostalgia of a Caribbean immigrant’s memories of home. 

In Cuba, it was almost impossible for Bellamy to find newspapers, although she included fragments of some in her paintings.  Some of her pieces include pop culture elements or plain ticket marks blown up over paintings of sunsets and beaches near empty roads. The dire realities shown in the news are blurred under soft colors and dreamy images of fantasy settings that evoke the escapism of a vacation island trip. Her vision of “rose-colored glasses” contributes to the artwork’s aura. 

During her residency at Fountainhead, Bellamy found Miami, a city so close to Cuba, to be the most inspiring and “strangely felt like home.” She witnessed, photographed, and reflected on how climate change continues to affect its structures and wildlife. “The gates and the architecture look like they have been through a lot. The way the vegetation grows so fast there.” She often asked, “Is this storm normal?” as the water entered her studio. She has gathered enough material for new artworks, and yes, in Miami, she concluded that this sort of flooding, this waiting for the rain to stop, was indeed normal.