University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Present myth, future fantasy revisiting Los Angeles with new ecologies

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Present myth, future fantasy revisiting Los Angeles with new ecologies

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PRESENT MYTH, FUTURE FANTASY
REVISITING LOS ANGELES WITH NEW ECOLOGIES

By

Jessica Taylor Bellamy

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF ART AND DESIGN
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF FINE ARTS
(FINE ARTS)

May 2022

i

“This dream retains its power in spite of proneness to logical disproof. It is the dream that
appears in Le Corbusier’s equation: un reve x 1,000,000 = chaos. Unfortunately for Le
Corbusier’s rhetorical mathematics, the chaos was in his mind, and not in Los Angeles, where
seven million adepts at California Dreaming can find their way around without confusion.”
-Los Angeles The Architecture of Four Ecologies (Banham, 220)

ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Timothy Ferrell
Andrea Bellamy
Mamis
Tia Daysi
Jennifer West
Mary Kelly
Nao Bustamante
Karen Liebowitz
Thomas Mueller
David Kelley
Juan Morales
Suzanne Lacy
Storm Ascher
Lauren Guilford
The Coven: Sophie, Erin, Franchesca, and Lainey

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Epigraph......................................................................................................................................i
Acknowledgements.....................................................................................................................ii
List of Figures.............................................................................................................................iv
Abstract.......................................................................................................................................v
Introduction.................................................................................................................................1
Ecology I: Fire Season................................................................................................................5
Ecology II: The Politics of Shade.............................................................................................10
Ecology III: Pollution / Smogtopia...........................................................................................15
Ecology IV: Mediated Spaces and Compiled Visual Histories................................................18
Conclusion................................................................................................................................24
Bibliography.............................................................................................................................28

iv

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1 Futility (Flood & Flame), 2021, oil on canvas, 24x30 inches,
Jessica Taylor Bellamy.....................................................................................9

Figure 2 Breaking the Dormancy (Fire Poppy Double Sunset), 2021,
oil on carved wood panels, 40x30 inches, Jessica Taylor Bellamy....................9

Figure 3 Whittier, CA and Jacaranda trees along my street corner in 2007....................14

Figure 4 Corner of 112th and Lemoli Inglewood, CA in 2007 from Google Maps........14

Figure 5 A screenshot of Ed Ruscha’s 12 Sunsets via the Getty Archives......................17

Figure 6 December 2021 Google image search for of smog............................................17

Figure 7 Still from Redlining Hawks, 2022, video, Jessica Taylor Bellamy....................23

Figure 8 Still from Construction Site Portal, 2022, Jessica Taylor Bellamy....................23

Figure 9 Reshaping the Narrative, 2020, image transfer on raw canvas,
58x30 inches, Jessica Taylor Bellamy.................................................................24

Figure 10 A kind of touchstone of reality, (rise and set), 2021, oil on canvas,
59x34.5 inches, Jessica Taylor Bellamy.............................................................. 25

v

ABSTRACT

This thesis is an analysis and imagining of four new ecologies for Los Angeles, with an
organizational structure that echoes Reyner Banham’s 1971 book. I examine these ecologies
through the lens of light, disaster, pollution, and subsequently, the climate crisis with art at the
center of my research. I deeply consider the interplay of my practice with the strangeness of the
natural and built environment of the city.

1

“First and most important is the experience of light.” - Aldous Huxley
“Light, color, and significance do not exist in isolation. They modify, or are manifested by,
objects” - Aldous Huxley

“The defining character of the place—the soul of the place”- Lawrence Weschler

“A subject that Angelenos are endlessly voluble about”- Lawrence Weschler

“The promise of L.A. floats, even tarnished, in view, if not in reach.” - Lynell George

Los Angeles has the eternal magic hour. People who are not from here often describe it as
intoxicating. Light is evenly distributed, almost sticking to everything it touches. Ecological
transformations are taking place in California, and quickly, under this eternal magic hour. The
West is a place with mythology, and a place with dualistic perceptions related to utopia and
dystopia. My focus on alternative or parallel realities comes from a concern for humans and their
environment and a desire to imagine the future of California as a place that can still work with
nature in a hybrid form.
In this paper, I am revisiting Reyner Banham's Los Angeles The Architecture of Four
Ecologies to analyze what these ecologies look like through the lens of light, and subsequently,
the climate crisis. I will make an art-centered application of my research into new ecologies for
Los Angeles. My reframing of ecologies references artists, writers, and urban planners who are
processing realism, fantasy, sunshine, and noir in these rapidly changing ecologies. Light is the
through line or indicator in thinking about this change when it is translated to the visual. The
change is overwhelming and everything about the city from the writings and artworks of Carey
McWilliams, Reyner Banham, Octavia Butler, Ed Ruscha, and Mike Davis were writing about
Los Angeles, has evolved.

2

Light, combined with heat, smog, smoke, or mediated by shade, pollution or pollen,
seems to have physicality or substance. Beyond the scientific, light is not only the thing itself and
its shadow, but also a sense of reflection. I propose that the space this thesis can hold is between
light and shadow, sunshine and noir. I see this substance, although beautiful, as a symptom that
can carry the threat of disaster and be a source of trauma for Angelenos. This is relevant when
you’re an artist and the light opens up a cascade of memories, as a trigger for a Proustian
moment
1
. Lawrence Weschler in his article, LA Glows, describes tears in his eyes while
watching the OJ Simpson car chase on television because of the soft glow from the Los Angeles
sunset. Edward Munch’s diary entry from 1892 describes the sudden blood-red sky causing him
to pause and “sense an infinite scream passing through nature” before painting The Scream.
I use light as the framework through which I will examine the new ecologies of the built
and natural environment. Using this framework, I propose four new ecologies to update the Los
Angeles of Reyner Banham and Ed Ruscha.
Reyner Banham’s famous book, Los Angeles The Architecture of Four Ecologies turned
50 in 2021. Banham’s book fits into the canon of literature of the built environment and into the
“sunshine v. noir” dichotomy, with his coloring of the city weighing heavily on the sunshine side
of this divide. He creates an unusual structure for the book (nonfiction and yet, not generic
criticism), that supports the unique nuances of the theme, which I echo in my updates: Ecology I:
Surfurbia, Ecology II Foothills, Ecology III The Plains of ID, Ecology IV, Autopia.
In my proposed ecologies, I first examine light through the lens of fire and smoke;
disasters which ought to be considered a new season, fire season, and what that means for each

1
The Proust effect refers to the vivid reliving of events from the past through sensory stimuli. Many of us are
familiar with those special moments, when you are taken by surprise by a sensory stimulus that evokes an intense
and emotional memory.

3

ecology. The second ecology considers light in relation to the urban forest and politics of shade
in our environment, including the movement towards a greening of Los Angeles as well as the
gender issues arising from the urban and ecological planning of the past. The third ecology is on
pollution. My fourth ecology shifts to the mediated spaces of the archives. Using complied visual
histories and experiences, I will address the point of view of artists and women of color with
reference to my own experience an artist who has never known the Los Angeles of the past and
whose work reflects the changes of the city.
Banham’s four ecologies for architecture, Surfurbia, the Foothills, the Plains of ID, and
Autopia have since been affected by the ecological and climate transformation. This is evident
in South Los Angeles, including Watts, Inglewood and other areas outlined in Kellie Jone’s
South of Pico, and in the fixation other artists have on interpreting light as utopic or dystopic,
such as Vija Celmins and Ed Ruscha. I believe it is important to create new and updated
ecologies because this is not only the story of Los Angeles, but the story of many communities
around the world. While Banham’s book is focused on architecture, it is ultimately an
observation of how people live in the city and what forces are most influencing and affecting
them, their lifestyle, routines and predilections. This is interesting to anyone who has ever
attempted to describe a place. I am interested in what ecologies might make more sense for the
21st century Los Angeles; particularly, taking into account climate change and light, and how
these representations and my subjective investment in them, can be translated into art.
Banham often gets praised for writing a book about Los Angeles on its own terms and not
from a European perspective. He opens the book by instructing the reader to “take everything
you’ve learned about Los Angeles and forget it”. He further extending the metaphor by
explaining if you take some watercolors and paint a map of the city by the time you’re done

4

making that map the sun will have bleached the light and color out of it and “you’ll have a dun
collared map like the dun-colored hillside”.
Reyner Banham's book has become a template for cities all around the world at different
times. Anthony Vidler writes in the forward to the 2000 edition of Banham’s book that TLS
(Times Literary Supplement) reviewer’s pain over the misuse of a word originally meaning the
study of ecosystems, had become an invitation to invent further, and less engaging, “counter-
ecologies:'' the “ecology of evil” of Peter Pages, and Mike Davis’s own “ecology of fear.”
2
It’s
subtitle “The Architecture of Four Ecologies,” marked it out as special and different. Joining the
two together, this title announced the intention to pose interrelated questions: What did
architecture have to do with ecology? What might be an ecology for architecture? Most
importantly, what would be the nature of an architecture considered in relation to its ecology?

2
Vidler, “Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies,” xxiv.

5

Ecology I: Fire Season
“Lately I have not known if I was looking at fog or smoke, friend or foe, when I saw a grey sky,
until I went out into it.” Rebecca Solnit, 2020

In the short amount of time that I’ve been walking the earth, I’ve been worried for the
planet and making art about that concern. I have memories of fire in the news cycle increasing
and worsening with the other factors of heat and drought. There is a serendipitous image of a six-
year old me, playing on the floor in my grandparent's home in the Whittier Hills with an old,
huge TV on in the background frozen in a moment with chyron mentioning evacuations due to
fire. I am smiling in the foreground, holding toy horses. Growing up in Whittier, I never gave the
dry conditions a second thought. I was worried about uncut 7 Up six-pack rings ending up in the
ocean and deforestation in Brazil, rather than my grandparents' backyard. At the age of 29, the
rapid change in the climate I have experienced in one geographic place has created a constant
awareness of how unsafe I would feel living almost anywhere in the state where there are golden
hills. I remember having recess indoors when it rained and huge puddles formed on the asphalt
while squirmy kids ate in the classroom, yet I don’t recall days where we stayed inside because
of smoke and ash. We have reached a point where what is currently happening regarding climate
change is staggeringly worse than we predicted.
Rebecca Solnit says we are in a new kind of era concerning this fire season
3
. Banham’s
second ecology, The Foothills, which reflects the most traditional notion of the biome, is perhaps
the most in need of this update and focus on a fire season. Fire season is defined as the time of
year that wildfires are most likely to take place
4
. In the past, the fire season on the West Coast

3
Solnit, “California's dark, Orange sky”
4
Welcome to CAL FIRE

6

was mainly from May through October. However, with climate change as a contributing factor,
most recent disasters show that the season is beginning earlier and ending later each year, with
some experts suggesting that the fire season in California is now year-round. This year, 17 out of
20 national forests in California, approximately 20 million acres, were closed to visitors. "I just
want to reiterate one thing: there's no stopping along the highway," said John Miller, a
spokesperson for the forest. "No picnicking, no stopping for lunch, no stopping to sightsee. It's
just basically to travel from the High Desert down into the L.A. Basin
5
"
In comparison to the burning chaparral and forest of Banham’s Ecology II, there is also
another form of fire season in Los Angeles: various small fires that are not directly linked to the
combination of heat, drought, and aging electrical equipment. In 2018, the Los Angeles Fire
Department began collecting data on fires related to homelessness. An article from earlier this
year in the Los Angeles Times states that in the years since collecting and classifying these fires,
they have nearly tripled, up to a rate of 24 fires a day, which made up 54% of all fires the
department responded to in the first quarter of 2021.
6
Earlier this year, a Times analysis of Los
Angeles Fire Department data showed that a third of the 15,610 fires related to homelessness
from 2018 to March 2021 were classified as arson. This data shows fire is now a regular
occurrence in every one of Banham’s ecologies for architecture within Los Angeles—and the
western United States.
It is not uncommon for me to see a fire in the city on my way to work or to school. With
a change so significant, it is hard to think of anything that is not colored by the effects of fire.
Consequently, it is a rising subject in art, as concerns and awareness increase. Part of what
translates, or what I am left with, are the endless images of what happens when something burns.

5
LA List, “Here Are The National Forests,”
6
Smith, Molina, Queally, “24 Fires a Day: Surge in Flames.”

7

We can’t get used to it: the blocked light, the color of the sky, the Instagram photos, and
interpretations of this new apocalypse. Now we are aware of climate change on a greater scale.
In previous decades, the satellite image of a recent burn area from space would have been of
blooming wildflowers. Now, an aerial image of California during a third of the year would show
us smothered in smoke, replacing the worries that smog held for the region in the 1970s. The
magnitude of this has led to imagery and themes of fire, smoke, climate concern imagery is
showing up in my work and among a generation of artists working in Los Angeles today.
Perhaps, this magnitude has also changed how fire is used symbolically and the way we see the
work of artists in the past.
Futility (Flood & Flame), my painting of an embossed transparent tsunami, sign reacts to
the common sight in Banham’s Ecology I, Surfurbia. The tsunami sign instructs the viewer to
seek safety on higher ground yet the painting coyly shows that none exists, since the overlaid
landscape, the higher ground is on fire. This fits with Ruscha’s aesthetic use of signs in his work
as recasting the western landscape, however, in my imagery it is the very edge of the western
landscape. This splits the difference between mundane and fantasy as “the positing of
compatibility under the aegis of the sign as exemplified by Ruscha emerged as a widespread
aesthetic in characterization of Los Angeles”.
7

In Ed Ruscha’s The Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire (1965-1968), the
viewpoint is from an aerial photography perspective. The museum is hazy yellow and set on a
blue surface. The flames and fire, much like the sunset in the painting of the Hollywood sign,
begs to be read referentially as a comment on the ills of the city
8
. Critics have been known to

7
Whiting “Pop L.A: Art and the City,” 81
8
Whiting “ Pop L.A: Art and the City.” 76.

8

attribute the bright colors of Ruscha’s sunsets to smog, and they have likewise interpreted the
fire in The Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire as an evocation of the Watts Riots, which
erupted in the city at the same time. It would be a mistake, however, to push such referential
readings too far, as Ruscha was asked “The fire and damage and violence generally, do you think
that’s a reflection of the American scene?” He replied “No, that has nothing to do with it.
Absolutely nothing to do with the destruction and people carrying guns around. No, it's visual”
9

It’s visual.
In my dimensional painting Breaking the Dormancy (Fire Poppy Double Sunset), the top
layer is a painted sunset from October 9th 2020, a week heavy with ash, smoke and smog. The
interior layer is an imagined sunset with carved lines radiating from the second sun, the number
representing every fire in the state that had burned more than 1,000 acres in the season. The
window is the silhouette of a fire poppy. The enchanting palette, like that of some of Ruscha’s
canvases, tie my work in a new way to the long heritage of western landscape painting in which
the west is a place of sublime, and often dangerous, beauty. Depending on where you are in the
city, the effects can be more harmful, just like the lack of shade in some areas.

9
Whiting “ Pop L.A: Art and the City.” 73.

9

Figure 1: Futility (Flood & Flame), 2021, oil on canvas, 24x30 inches, Jessica Taylor Bellamy

Figure 2: Breaking the Dormancy (Fire Poppy Double Sunset), 2021, oil on carved wood panels,
40x30 inches, Jessica Taylor Bellamy.

10

Ecology II: The Politics of Shade
“Sometimes you might glimpse a flock of bright parasols shielding women like Octavia’s now
long-gone mother who do day-work from the harsh sun. Parked beneath the shade of magnolia
trees, street vendors sell fresh melons and mangoes” (George, 11)

Growing up, I would visit relatives in other parts of the Southlands and observe the
landscape from the passenger seat or when skating in the neighborhoods. I would first notice the
types of trees I could see. Mission Viejo had streets with shade from pine trees, sycamore and
California pepper, along with the ‘cleaner’ queen palms lining the “late 90s build” homes. In
Palos Verdes the deeper into the estates, the more eucalyptus (and memories of my uncle battling
a neighbor who wanted to cut down a tree that was blocking a fingernail-sized view to the ocean
if you squinted and used binoculars). Whittier had purple Jacaranda trees with flowers falling
like sticky snow that lined my walk home from sixth through eighth grade. Abundant shade from
Ficus trees whose roots were destroying the sidewalks. An orange or avocado tree in every yard
and crepe myrtles causing relentless allergies. But, when I would visit my grandma in a
residential neighborhood in Inglewood, the trees were missing. A stark brightness, that while
visible everywhere else, was the primary indicator of oppressive heat and little escape for anyone
or anything outdoors. As iconic and important as the light is for a person living here, it is
transformed into something harmful if cooling shade cannot be found and this imbalance shapes
how we interpret a place.
The planting of trees has always been politicized. Shade is capital that can be owned, like
the privately operated and maintained bus shelters which bring in advertising revenue, yet only
in higher-income neighborhoods due to ad space. Shade is tied to class and race. On top of class
(domestic workers and people who use public transportation unable to escape to shade for long
stretches of the day) and race (neighborhoods that were seen as low income and highly policed

11

trees were thought to be a good place to hide guns or drugs), there are also hidden health and
climate issues with shade from trees done wrong as well. Botanical sexism, favoritism to
planting male trees, since they are allegedly “litter-free”, is practiced despite the inconvenient
fact that all trees regardless of sex produce abundant allergenic pollen.
10

Pollen is related to the big, interconnected issue of light because it is a particle. Across
North America, studies show a warmer climate is increasing the length of pollen seasons by
twenty days, along with an increase in pollen concentration. This human forcing of the climate
system contributes to effects on respiratory health.
11
Currently, in the city of Los Angeles,
officials are treating sunshine as a growing crisis.
12
Light and heat need to be met with adequate
shelter and thus there has been a shift in the last twenty years in this conversation. Mike Davis
calls this ‘the politics of shade’.
In 2019, Mayor Eric Garcetti created the post of City Forestry Officer within the Board of
Public Works to ensure all of the City’s departments and external partners use an integrated and
equitable approach to implementing the urban forestry goals outlined in L.A.’s Green New Deal.
These goals include planting 90,000 trees and increasing tree canopy by at least 50 percent by
2028 in areas with the least shade, which tend to be the City’s hottest, low-income communities.
The Office of City Forest Management is responsible for spearheading the development of a
citywide Urban Forest Management Plan, building on new data tools, the ongoing Street Tree
Inventory, and the 2018 report First Step: Developing an Urban Forest Management Plan for
the City of Los Angeles. The Forestry Officer has the responsibility of carrying out the plans for
many of these recommendations.
This new position of Forestry Officer created in 2019 and filled by Rachel Malarich, has

10
Ogren, “Botanical Sexism Cultivates Home-Grown Allergies”.
11
Andgrenn, “Anthropogenic Climate Change Is Worsening North American Pollen Seasons”.
12
Arango, “Turn off the Sunshine”.

12

a great deal of power to organize many city departments to achieve an impressive urban forest in
LA, something that will shape the city for decades to come. The field of urban forestry is
important in linking both natural and built, as urban forests are always man-made, with people in
the city as players to add to the success of the urban forest. This idea is posited in Emma
Marris’s book, Rambunctious Garden. She states that humans can be an asset to nature; with
assisted migration, rewilding and embracing some exotic species and novel ecosystems to
maximize every scrap of land and water.
13
Building an urban canopy through urban forestry can
be thought of as another type of infrastructure. The goal of planting 90,000 trees by 2021 will
have a large impact on both the visual and climatic experience people have in LA as the foliage
matures.
As an artist it is fascinating to consider what is to come concerning urban ecology and
infrastructure, seeing natural landmarks like trees as major ways to represent Los Angeles to
present and future residents and to the world vs how those visual indicators of nature translate
phenomenologically, and then to art. Visually, I am interested in what plants are being picked for
each subregion, as this links to a broader history of planting trees in the city for a facade or as
superficial repairs for LA when a major event, such as the 1932 and 1984 Olympics, bring
attention to the region. Part of the planning of an urban forest means major changes to areas that
lack the space that trees need; specifically, soil volume and space in the ground. I also think
about the lifespan of trees as important visual markers in a city, the same way the built
architecture served Banham in his ecologies. This is exciting to me as an artist who considers my
identity and connection to a place.
Los Angeles is the most biodiverse area in the continental United States and has the
largest megafauna in the nation.
14
Here, the natural is not something that can be clearly

13
Marris, “Rambunctious Garden” 135.
14
“Sustainability Office LA County, Landscapes and Ecosystems Briefing”.

13

delineated from the built, and species that have been all but wiped out in their natural habitat
have come to thrive in Los Angeles.
The briefing from the 2018 sustainability report links the diverse natural ecosystem to the
county’s urban growth and infrastructure. This outlines what might be quite obvious: that the
health of our ecosystem directly affects the wellbeing of the people, shaping their lives by access
to clean air, clean water and open spaces. More than a report, it positions itself as a vision or plan
for the future of LA with actual ecosystems at the forefront. It also provides data to back up
Carey McWilliams, author of Southern California Island on The Land, grounding the
“mythology” of Southern California's utopian and unique landscape in habitats and species of
flora and fauna, proving that the county is the most urbanized biodiversity hotspot in the
continental United States. Through data and comparisons, it maps what we see.
How much park space, how much land in the county is devoted to growing food, and most
importantly with a changing climate, where is there shade? Natural elements become their own
visual markers of a city just as important as infrastructure or design. Implicitly, this illuminates
aesthetic changes in the landscape, looping back to how Los Angeles is depicted by artists,
writers, and visual futurists like Octavia Butler’s cataloging the state of various trees in her
journal, visible as she traveled the city by bus. This report also shows the city has the lowest
score for its urban tree canopy. It also serves as a kind of warning that if we want an LA that we
can recognize in the future, this specific work needs to be done in order to shift to a still-possible
lush, utopic future of LA where the uniqueness of the land is not lost if urban and suburban
development goes unaddressed. It’s a place where policy shapes the future landscape and artists
respond.

14

Figure 3: Whittier, CA and Jacaranda trees along my street corner in 2007.

Figure 4: Corner of 112th and Lemoli Inglewood, CA in 2007 from Google Maps.

15

Ecology III: Pollution / Smogtopia
Like smoke from fires and canopies of trees, air pollution can obliterate our visual
connection to the natural landscape and impact the region's ecology. It alters my perception of
distance and light which is enough to color how I depict the feeling of a place. My depictions are
art documentation, part is mediation, and the rest is an artistic expression. Before I even knew
the word smog, I was seeing through the lens of this pollution on an average of 157 days per year
in 2020 alone
15
. Smog is the lens that shapes perception.
Oddly enough, smog in the city during the time of Banham was linked closely to his
ecology IV Autopia, but now the same visual indicator of poor air has a new cause. While we
live in the time of Teslas, 2020 was the worst year for air quality in Los Angeles since the 1990s.
Decades of regulation on passenger vehicles since the 1970s have made it so that passenger
vehicles are no longer the main source of pollution. The car culture of Banahm’s Autopia and
pollution are not the biggest visual link to the muddy skies, but climate change and extreme heat
being the catalyst to fuel a photochemical reaction that creates ozone
Often my indicator of smog is how far I can see. Collectively when speaking about LA’s
smog, publications such as the LA Times use photos that try to capture downtown from a
distance, like a ghost, disappearing and reappearing from sight. Google “pollution Los Angeles”
and endless cinematic doom-scrolling ensues of a hazy, grainy, veil creeping over the landscape.
In my painted skies the colors and the clarity I choose to represent hold meaning in this smog.
This depiction has parallels to the visual tradition established by nineteenth-century landscape
paintings, defining the west by its distinctive topography and light. However, in my work, those
depictions can be linked to search results like “air quality charts”, and op-eds about air quality. It
may be sublime, but we know it is the pollution. This leads me to wonder, how has our ecology

15
Barboza, ““L.A. Began 2020 with a Clean-Air Streak”.

16

covered by pollution shaped perception? What has art done to track it? Science and data avoid
fantasy but art can meet it to create a space for reflection.
The visual can shift us away from the statistics and models of atmospheric data and can
represent a feeling with a shift in consciousness and mood. It can resonate more strongly due to
the personal insight and visual connection it holds for people. I use the notion of brightness (or
light) to instigate a conversation or draw attention to the phenomenological response to
information in my world. In Sublime Interrupted (wild bloody mustard), 2021, various stories
about pollution are overlaid as a screen print onto a pink-to-yellow gradient. A yellow mustard
weed sits on top, clearly uprooted. The colors in a sunset have some sort of aesthetic power, a
slight tinge in tone or layer of screen printing that muddies the bright sunset color of the canvas.
This pollution has been going on for so long that it colors the visual perception of Los
Angeles in the decades of work by artist Ed Ruscha. Ed Ruscha began making art about the topic
of smog and in the decades since, his work has allowed a way to opened up a dialogue although
people don’t want to talk about it. It is art like his that also paves the way we see the city.
Between 1966 and 2007, Ruscha took thousands of photos showing the change on Sunset Blvd in
Every Building on the Sunset Strip. Ruscha used some of these photos for his paintings and other
artworks. Each photo was captured by a camera attached to his pickup truck as he drove along
Sunset Boulevard 12 different times over 50 years between 1967 and 2007 and through the years,
he made the shift to color photography. The full archive (pictured in figure 5) is recently
available, and the source uses artificial intelligence to help search the photos for different and
specific subjects. As such, it provides an extremely useful artistic record for a city. At the same
time, the photos show his interest in and clear fascination with the changing environment and
illustrate how he translates this documentation into art through mediation and expression.
In the interactive archive there is a function to sort the 65,972 images by visual tags.
Some of the ones I am interested in that can shape the feeling of heat, pollution, or atmosphere

17

were Light: 582 images, Atmosphere: 1,863 images, Haze: image, Fog: 81 images, Sunlight: 458
images, and Smoke: 26 images. With this research, it became clear to me that sometimes a single
painting can do the job of visually describing hundreds of these images better than the reality a
camera affords. The effects captured like the light, sunset, pollution or smog is coloring what the
dream is or can be.

Figure 5: A screenshot of Ed Ruscha’s 12 Sunsets via the Getty Archives

Figure 6: December 2021 Google image search for of smog

18

Ecology IV: Mediated Spaces and Compiled Visual Histories
As an artist, I am attracted to myths based on recent truths or perceived truths. The
history and creation of mythology wrapped up in my work range from references to newspapers,
isolated and repeated cycles of the phases of the moon, the smog chats, and images isolated from
their headlines to form new narratives to building on mythos that were perhaps once a reality.
For example, the myth that “everywhere in LA takes 20 mins” to myths about a paradise LA of
the good ol’ days. Using these myths based on reality as rich source material to create my art and
how my interest in the archive I’ve created (the archive as a garden or a newspaper, or an oral
story describing a place) as it relates to the natural world and myth can feed my practice for years
to come. A painting can only contain so much of a story, like a freeze-frame with some of the
gaps filled in by the artist and the rest of the meaning of the myth remaining encoded and ever
changing as an image which has led to me making a time-based work. Banham is also interested
in myth and approaches it in his book in a way that is as bizarre as the contradictions of the city
it mirrors. It is important to note once again, that this book is on the sunshine side of the divide
of the sunshine and noir dichotomy of Los Angeles literature which is the basis for many myths
or attitudes about the city.
16
I am finding Banham important to revisit because there are gaps
between his observations and what has held true.
According to those who have similar interests on the internet, my attention to
newspapers, headlines, ads, and crowdsourced imagery reinforces the “myth” of Los Angeles
that Banham worked to combat, and consequently feeds into the booster and sunshine myth by
default. Therefore, I propose this fourth ecology. Beyond daily life, the walks I take and the

16
Ulin, “Reassessing Reyner Banham’s Famous Book”

19

places I drive, media images are at the core of a lot of my paintings. I am reminded of Vija
Celmins drawing images from her TV or Octavia Butler starting each day with NPR and the LA
Times, and I have observed how these new mediated spaces of the internet form different mass
apocalypse images of LA now.
The LA-based painter and art critic Peter Plagans, applauded the immoral color
combinations (magenta, yellow, orange and blue) of Craig Kauffman's plastic paintings and the
“unabashedly perfumy” wit of Billy Al Bengston et al, concluding that “Southern California
sunsets, neon, flowers, ocean, desert landscapes, and wide boulevards sifted their way into the
sub consciousnesses (or consciousnesses) of Los Angeles artist.”
17
This in turn, leads me to think
about how I am using nature to depict a multilayered resilience and support the dream of a
utopian future in my work. Specifically, I use the fire-follower wildflowers that only bloom after
the earth has been scorched and the red-tailed hawk as symbols that are meant to communicate
the more complicated and personal meanings of immigration to an audience.
When my family immigrated to Inglewood, California in the 1970s, they were perceived
as Black or African Americans, and blended into a history and mythology that didn’t necessarily
belong to them. Currently, I am finding references and recording audio archives about how the
Cubans in my family became Californians, framing the stories I’ve collected to relate to Los
Angeles’s history and changes as a region ecologically, from rural to urban. I am also using the
LA Times newspaper archives from 1965 to today to see how the group is described, how race is
addressed, and the way in which the Cuban emigration was framed specifically by newspapers in
California during that time and have begun. I have begun to uncover some interesting instances

17
Fox “Catalog L.A.: Birth of an Art Capital” 33.

20

of histories repeating themselves. The 1970s was also Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles. At the
time, the city had a larger percentage of Black Americans, which today stands at 9.9 percent, less
than half of the population in the 1970s.
18
Whether by omission or oversight, the fact that none
of Banham’s observations take into account the architectural and creative contributions from a
large part of the population and landscape has not gone unnoticed. In a recent lecture revisiting
Banham’s Four Ecologies on its 50th anniversary, Victor Jones, Principal architect at Fiever
Jones, Inc and Assistant Professor at Cal Poly Pomona shared that he thought “it was maybe too
difficult to talk about those things during a period that was just at the tail end of the civil rights
movement that it would be too distracting of a topic to talk about these kinds of cultural and
identity aspects of Los Angeles and not do what the book really intended to do, which was kind
of outrageously declare Los Angeles as a great city”
19
. In other words, only addressed the light
and not the shade. A black and white photo of Watts on page 178 shows no human life, simply
the Watts Towers and railroad tracks.
20
I am interested in filling out the gaps in this snapshot and
revising, or proposing new ecologies related to mine and my family’s experience of the city in
my art.
In three of my pieces, Redlining Hawks (an animated memory), 2022 a video that
combines hand painted animation, voiceover conversations between my aunt (Tia Daysi) and my
father and her brother Leandro Bellamy, Construction Site Portal, 2022 and (currently untitled
“we buy houses, I buy souls sign painting), 2022, I mine history and future experiences of the

18
Simpson, “The Great Migration: Creating a new black identity”.
19
Jones, “Reassessing Reyner Banham’s Famous Book,”
20
Banham, “Los Angeles The Architecture of Four Ecologies”,178.

21

immigrants inhabiting the flatlands and autopia of the city that has been impacted by
environmental change.
Redlining Hawks is an animated memory launched by my curiosity into my family's LA
history and my realization that many of the storytellers in my family are passing away or unable
to communicate. For this project I focused on my father’s side of the family who immigrated to
Los Angeles from Havana, Cuba in 1969; settling in Inglewood at 112th and Lemoli Ave in
1971, an area categorized as Ecology III Plains of ID in Banham’s book. My grandmother and
multiple family members all live either in that same house or a few blocks away in an area that
was formerly redlined and is rapidly gentrifying. The question I asked my Tia Daysi which
prompted the audio for my piece was “what was the biggest change in your neighborhood since
you moved here?”. Like Laurence Weschler’s response to light in the LA Glows article, my Tia
Daysi’s Proustian moment, the one thing that triggered a rich and interconnected memory told in
the story was the disappearance of a bright and grassy field near their home. This “biggest
change” was something that maybe only a child would notice due to walking and playing outside
and what full rich possibilities an empty grassy field could hold for a girl who knew to come
home from playing when the streetlights went on. After her response, I asked my dad to expand
on the same memory from the 70’s. This focus on simultaneity of a place in different times helps
me to place into context family stories with an interest in the practice of redlining and how racist
housing policies of the past may link to the climate risks of today.
Redlining Hawks, 2022, is a hand painted stop animation edited together with videos of
Los Angeles and the environment. Through traditional use of oil and acrylic paint on glass I pair
traditional painting of the light, and pairing natural the hawk, the poppy, the forget-me-nots, and
the horses of the Compton Cowboys with the built environment of the city to link my

22

observations of specific change beyond my personal biography. To be clear redlining is only one
type of transformation, a jumping off point for thinking about this project. It really is more about
lots of types of transformations, rural to urban and transforming the way I engage with my
family.
While working on this video, I was deep into research on urban forests, and the problems
with shade in Los Angeles. Initially, I took the redlining map, (drawn in 1939 and banned from
practice in the 1960s) and overlaid each color-coded part of Los Angeles with a recent map from
the 2018 LA sustainability report showing tree canopy and shade coverage. The information is
overwhelming. The borders of the old redlining maps show stark differences in canopy coverage,
and much the view and experience of the city changes for humans and animals depending on
which zip or even parcel you look at. The map includes information for types of land cover in
Los Angeles County in addition to the tree canopy coverage, as well as possible future coverage
or the potential certain areas of the city have for forest cover. I created Construction Site Portal,
2021, an installation of two 52x52 sections of chain link fence, raw canvas with 2020 LA Times
image transfers, acrylic paint, and TV screen. The image transfers on the first canvas make up a
redlining map of Los Angeles. The redlining map is cut open, similar to the privacy tarps slashed
open all over the city, that reveal a window or a portal to a real, yet different and more fantastic
reality. LA is in a constant state of construction. This installation is inspired by a sewage
construction site near my house that is just yards from the ocean. The second canvas behind the
fence is the potential tree coverage map. This map is a dream; a goal to help mitigate the
combination of intense light, drought and heat on those living in areas without coverage. The
edited footage are videos shot on my phone, either while walking or driving in a span of over
almost three years. It’s slower and meditative, recreating the feeling of walking in my

23

neighborhood, observing how the sun, air, and sea changes day after day with more intensity,
looking again and again in order to see more in a space between fantasy and reality, sunshine and
noir.

Figure 8: Still from Construction Site Portal, 2022, Jessica Taylor Bellamy

24

Conclusion
I stated in the introduction that I am essentially interested in an art-centered kind of
research into new ecologies for Los Angeles and how that applies to my work. Focusing on light
and the way it shapes ecologies is an important framework for my inquiry. Something that comes
to mind with each ecology previously mentioned, (the impacts of fire season, pollution, and the
politics of shade) is how I am working with existing archives or make new archives. Materials
have meaning and at this point they are all sourced from the city.
This is a type of regenerative work, transforming archives into new shapes and forms.
Reshaping the Narrative, 2020 is my first attempt to apply the practice of archiving and
collecting, to grow into something new.

Figure 9: Reshaping the Narrative, 2020, image transfer on raw canvas, 58x30 inches, Jessica
Taylor Bellamy

25

Figure 10: A kind of touchstone of reality, (rise and set), 2021, oil on canvas, 59x34.5 inches,
Jessica Taylor Bellamy

The work disentangles the parallels between two clashing realities, the sunshine and the
noir. On one end, California is mythologized as a place where national parks and liberal ideology
pervade. On the other, it is the subject of climate, agricultural and social grief which must be
resolved before the passage of time proves to be too late.
In communicating these realities, the nature of the work expanded from painting to an
image-transfer technique that incorporates images from the Los Angeles Times using them to
trace the silhouette of a waterfall, or to many Yosemite Falls, acting as a portal. Poppy fields are
juxtaposed next to wildfires, snow-white mountains next to monumental skyscrapers, and crisp-
blue oceans next to police officers, hidden behind the nebulous smoke of tear gas. The small
traces of paper that deteriorate in the process of transferring the images gives a feeling of
nostalgia. Without a paintbrush to rely on, I am adjusting to the political interests of the
numerous journalists behind the photographs. Color, shape, and size are the only components

26

that I can manipulate along with removing the text that imbued the visuals with a different
meaning.
As I’ve previously expressed, dystopic and utopic interpretations of the world are two
sides of the same coin. As such, Reshaping the Narrative, 2021 stands as a metaphor for seeing
the two sides, including the one that is not advertised, that must be confronted, and cannot be
modified.
The archive is ongoing and functions in different ways. I create or find hard copies, and
often include living or once living material like the wildflowers and weeds picked from Whittier,
Playa Del Rey, and Baldwin Hills, making photocopies and organizing by time, place and
condition. The archive also grows with the with the collected images of driving west on the
freeway at sunset, and the thousands of clouds and shaggy palm tree photos. Organized by what
second meaning the material or the captured photograph might hold these collections are further
transformed by the use of screen printing.
In A kind of touchstone of reality, (rise and set), 2021 the newspaper is on display again,
and once more the source of the LA Times is not revealed. The undulating pattern of moon
phases and daily sunrise and sunset times for the float like a veil in front of an empty freeway.
Each sun and moon was cut out from the area of the paper nestled between the colorful banding
of “weather patterns in the US today” and from the tide and air quality charts of the day. Texts
like, sun and moon, or images of the moon phases each day condense so much meaning that they
seem to touch on just about everything. The timing is something that can be recorded and
calculated, but it brings up the question: what might this be used for today? How much
information would the viewer, even an Angelina, need to interpret this chart in another context?

27

While each painting is unique, each sun and moon chart is actually a process archive. I
began by cutting out this section from the paper every day of 2020 and I continue to the present.
It is an instinctive act. The sunset is how I timed my walk every day, in order to be outside when
light is the most magical. Collecting the paper was another way for me to create a regular
documentation of this same event, turning into a representation of time. Questioning, if this is
what time feels like? It feels like a wave form, it also feels backwards and upside down. It feels
like I can arrange it anyway I like.
Translating the archive into screen printing has led to a unity or a clarity of seemingly
disparate elements, while also creating a confusion of what is real. It is also a way to bring
relevant stories or moments in time forward and combine them with my very real ecological
concerns or questions about my future here. I am dealing with repetitions in history, which is
always cyclic and I know the idea that we are on the verge of crisis and collapse is nothing new,
but I am interested in layering these cycles as a portal that provides a glimpse of reality in which
a future is still possible.

28

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract This thesis is an analysis and imagining of four new ecologies for Los Angeles, with an organizational structure that echoes Reyner Banham’s 1971 book. I examine these ecologies through
the lens of light, disaster, pollution, and subsequently, the climate crisis with art at the center of my research. I deeply consider the interplay of my practice with the strangeness of the natural
and built environment of the city.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Bellamy, Jessica Taylor (author)

Core Title Present myth, future fantasy revisiting Los Angeles with new ecologies

School Roski School of Art and Design

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Fine Arts

Publication Date 03/11/2022

Defense Date 03/11/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Los Angeles,OAI-PMH Harvest,oil painter,Pollution,Reyner Banham,shade,Sunshine noir

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor West, Jennifer (committee chair), Kelly, Mary (committee member), Liebowitz, Karen (committee member), Mueller, Thomas (committee member)

Creator Email jbellamy@usc.edu,jesbellamy@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC110816141

Unique identifier UC110816141

Document Type Thesis

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Bellamy, Jessica Taylor

Type texts

Source 20220321-usctheses-batch-916 (batch), University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

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