A USC Macomber Travel Grant Exhibition by Jessica Taylor Bellamy

Co-curated by Ana Briz

Opening reception: August 4 from 6 - 9pm with set by DJ Valida

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Exhibition on view: August 7 - 19, 2023

Gallery hours: Wed - Fri, 12 - 6pm or by appointment

USC Roski Graduate Gallery 

In the Los Angeles Arts District

1262 Palmetto St, Los Angeles, CA 90013

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

By exhibition curator Ana Briz

Vanities Come to Dust: From Havana to Los Angeles, With Love (August 7 - 19, 2023) features a new body of work by multidisciplinary artist Jessica Taylor Bellamy on the occasion of her USC Macomber Travel Grant. Bellamy, whose work explores the symbiosis of illusions and reality, visited Cuba in the fall of 2022 as an investigation into what distances and brings together Cuba and the United States. Interested in exploring various forms of exchange between the island and the U.S., Bellamy’s paintings for the exhibition are a layered examination of the migrant, medical, financial, and aesthetic exchanges between Havana, Cuba and Los Angeles, California. From scarce newspapers and weather reports to foreign automobiles and boarding passes, this body of work archives ephemeral records of time spent on this planet, isolating fragmented ephemera from their everyday and enlarging them so that their impact is visualized and more readily felt.

Bellamy’s visual language works through incongruities to make sense of the paradoxes of life. She brings two sides of the same coin into our plane of vision, placing opposites atop one another into a palimpsest worth teasing out. In Cuba, Bellamy came to understand the everydayness of diaspora from a different vantage point, where the mundane and forgotten clashes with the idyllic and fantastical until they merge into one paradoxical reality. Cuba’s picturesque sunsets and tropical landscapes are made uneasy, less inviting in her paintings. Screened off behind layers of text, iconic vistas sought after the tourist economy are reprocessed through a lens informed by the history of U.S. imperialism on the island. Reclaimed through this practice, Bellamy’s paintings offer new ways of engaging with Cuba today.

For Vanities Come to Dust, Bellamy has invited four Matanzas-based artists to participate in the exhibition: Helga Montalván (1976-), Adrian Socorro Suarez (1979-), Ernesto Millan (1973-), and Jorge Y. Salomón (1987-). Collectively, their works present a shared visual language to examine tensions between globalization, consumerism, and ancestral traditions. The exhibition’s title draws from Joan Didion’s Miami (1987), wherein Didion famously wrote at the outset of the book: “Havana vanities come to dust in Miami.” As an analysis of the socio-political relations between Cuba and the U.S. post-Cuban Revolution, Miami contends with how exile and diaspora can transform a city once the dust settles in place. In this exhibition, the dust never permanently settles, and instead we are offered the opportunity to speculate about the past, present, and future of Cuba’s relationship with Los Angeles.