AYANNA DOZIER

Field Resident, November 13 - December 25, 2022

Artist Statement

My work aims to name and make visible what Toni Morrison describe as the unspeakable or illegible acts of history that are erased by systems of white supremacist patriarchy. Across Polaroids, film, printmaking, and research, I look at the lives of sex workers, erased histories, medical injustice, and sexual justice to make images for those under-recognized narratives across time. Influenced by equal parts of feminism, conceptualism, and hoodooism, my work does not represent these unspeakable acts but rather creates an emotive and embodied response to these systems of injustice through experimentation. Much like the work of Maya Deren, Ana Mendieta, and Adrian Piper, my films and images use the body and dreams to uncover what is forgotten or not realized. This opens space for me to incorporate autobiography with a surrealistic bent. I use these artists, concepts, and methods to play with time and truth to create work that is authentically inauthentic, but is still capable of revealing something new to others in the process. Naming unspeakable acts for Morrison and myself means taking in a dose of the spiritual world to help manifest and realize what is often not believed, what lies beneath, or what is claimed to not exist in our reality.

AYANNA’S PROJECT

“It’s Just Business, Baby” is a mixed-media installation that examines the histories of various forms of body labor across sex work, meatpacking, and clubs that comprised of the West-side piers. Focusing on the gentrification of the meatpacking district, the expanded cinema piece will weave together these seemingly disparate histories of body labor to audiences. In her essay, “Stains, Staining and the Ethics of Dirty Work” Sheen Vachhani argues that stains are a way to demarcate a body’s class status in society. Following this, my work will examine labor through its visual and sensorial imprint on the body rather than its representation to create a visceral portrait of an erased queer and derelict environment that is now architecturally marked by upscale commerce and glass. The mixed-media installation will feature large sheets of latex suspended from the ceiling that will function as a both a physical site of enclosure for audiences to enter and a screen. Within the circular space, two 16mm projectors will play looped film onto theses latex sheets at opposite directions. Alongside the projected screens will be a series of platinum gampi prints mounted onto latex canvas and washi paper. These images will comprise of abstracted images of the environment, bodies, and labor that was indicative of the labor that defined the neighborhood. The film component will play feature footage from Weichsel beef, the last remaining meat-house in the meatpacking district, alongside abstracted imagery of bodies, and the nearby Hudson to draw out the narrative of labor, sex, gentrification, and displacement that make up the expanded installation. The audio will comprise of found audio from the environment alongside interviews and fabulated sounds of the labor long lost. The intended result is that this installation will deliver a ghostly account of labor and embodiment that physically affects viewers rather than a complete representational account of a bygone times.

Artist Biography

Ayanna Dozier is a Brooklyn-based artist-writer working across film (both motion picture and still), performance, and installation. She recently completed her Ph.D. in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. Her films have screened at film festivals across the United States and the United Kingdom which includes; Prismatic Ground (2022), Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival (2021), Open City Docs (2020), and Aesthetica Film Festival where she was the recipient of Best Experimental in 2020 for her film Softer. Her work has been exhibited at Microscope Gallery, The Shed, Westbeth Gallery, Evening Hours, Anthology Film Archives, and the Block Museum amongst other places. She is the author of The Velvet Rope as part of the 33 1/3 music series for Bloomsbury Academic Press. She was a 2018-2019 Helena Rubinstein Fellow in Critical Studies at the Whitney Independent Studies Program, a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art from 2017-2022, a 2022 Winter Workspace Resident at Wave Hill, and a filmmaker in residence at MONO NO AWARE from 2019-2020. She is currently working on a manuscript on the life and art of abstract film and visual artist, Camille Billops.