Ayanna Dozier

Between pandemics, people’s revolts and male institutions, this period film cheekily combines fantastic psychedelia and handmade sets. Inspired by the life story of Julian of Norwich, a 14th-century mystic and the first woman to write a book in English.

Often discussed as an urban legend or a failed architectural project, Solomon Riley Presents Negro Coney Island redresses the erasure around Riley’s completed amusement park for the Black Residents in Harlem and the Bronx in 1924 on Hart Island. Working across archives, contemporary footage of Hart Island, and speculative interviews with key Black cultural producers of the time, including Riley, the film reimagines what we know about Negro Coney Island and its legacy with New York City’s still active potter’s field, Hart Island.

Ayanna Dozier assumes the character of a young woman who enters a love motel to re-train her emotions about love and sex in lovertits, a 4-minute film inspired in part by Charles Matton’s French erotica movie Spermula. In this version, the woman, who is seen bathing in a bikini in a heart-shaped bath, unsuccessfully attempts to embrace “superficial happiness, femininity and passiveness.” This film is part of the trilogy, "Close, but no Cigar." [Overview Courtesy of Ayanna Dozier]

Bounded Intimacy (part of the trilogy of Super 8mm shorts It’s Just Business, Baby) examines the histories of various forms of body labor across the Chelsea and Tribeca districts, renowned as a sites for sex work, sex clubs and illicit sexual activity. Bounded Intimacy explores the seduction of a nameless woman and the camera. The relationship between the two remains unknown and ambivalent as to whether or not the encounter is “authentic.” The nature of their relationship is irrelevant as the camera captures the authenticity of the desire in the encounter between the two. (Ayanna Dozier)

Shot on both b&w and color film stock, the 5-minute “Let’s Make Love and Listen to Death from Above” re-animates “illicit” trades that took place, emphasizing the “desire and affect that still roam and haunt the Chelsea District.” [Overview Courtesy of Microscope Gallery]

"Maman Brigitte" stitches together the intimacy of a private manifestation Hoodoo vevue of Maman Brigitte (the barrier between the living and the dead) with the aurality of the body (spitting, running, vomiting, etc.). These “interior” corporeal practices are juxtaposed against sweeping landscapes to draw out film/ritual’s capacity to manifest.

Softer examines the demands of "softening" that are requested of Black women's bodies in society---from job prospects to romantic ones---be that in their voice, their manners, and, critically, their hair. The experimental short plays upon the grooming rituals of softening that are terrifyingly rough through a recreation of a permanent wave machine produced perm (popular in the 1930s-1950s). The short mediates on the historical ways in which Black women have tried to answer this demand on softness through respectable appearance and behavior.

"Nightwalker" codes disproportionately target Black femmes or women who “make a display” by wearing clothing that can be deemed risqué by an arresting officer. In Nightwalker (2022), a film that is an extension of a Polaroid and audio project entitled Solicitation of Crimes Against Nature (2021), I draw attention to how the surveillance eye overlaps with the gaze of a potential predator. The film is ambivalent as to whether or not the character is a sex worker and is more interested in the act of surveillance "sight-based" discourse that names individuals as such.

A Picture for Parco, recreates a 1980s commercial made for a Japanese department store chain by Kazumi Kurigami taking on the role previously played by an elegantly dressed Faye Dunaway sitting at a table, set against a black background, slowly and seductively eating a hardboiled egg. Filmed on the one-year anniversary of Dozier's last colposcopy, the piece evokes a range of intense feelings not present in the original. This film is part of the trilogy, "Close, but no Cigar." [Overview Courtesy of Ayanna Dozier]

Genesis 38:14 sees Dozier enact a nonconsensual collaboration with James Turrell’s Sky Pesher by performing a pole routine inside of it. The meta commentary of nonconsent mirrors the allegory of the first account of a sex worker in the Bible, Tamar in Genesis 38: 14-15. Tamar, recently widowed and forced to live outside of the city walls as a single woman, sells sex to her ex father-in-law by way of stealing his sperm so that he would be compelled to marry/claim her and her child. Through movement associated with both erotic and modern dance, Dozier traces the narrative trajectory of Tamar as both an exiled and revered figure of erotic potential inside and outside of Turrell’s Sky Pesher.

Forever Your Girl acts out the loss of childhood innocence and desire through a hypersexualized subject attempting to ride a carousel kiddie ride. Due to misogynoir, the intersectional, racist misogyny directed toward Black women, girlhood is often an accelerated path to becoming an adult where innocence and bodily agency are denied and any attempts to return are simultaneously deemed inappropriate and unobtainable. Crackling in Super 8mm film with the distressed audio of found sounds and synth music produced by the artist and the noise musician C. Spencer Yeh, Forever Your Girl dissolves expectations. While inspired by soft-porn aesthetics, it defies the anticipated imagery and familiar mood of pornographic content. The scenes are similarly disorienting with flashing lights, glamor aesthetics, and slow repetitive actions. (from Ayanna Dozier's website https://dozierayanna.com)

It’s Just Business, Baby is also part of the trilogy of the same name. The film captures an encounter between a client and a working girl where the lines of care are blurred following a session. The film repeats this encounter with the same actors switching parts to trouble the relationship of power that exists between that dynamic. (Ayanna Dozier)

Doing it For Daddy is a double 8mm film printed onto 16mm film that considers how the types of gendered service labor expected of women in institutions and relationships overlap. Taking a cue from both the biographical experience of the director's own upbringing in a Christian fundamentalist church and later relationship with sex work as well as Madonna's influential "Like a Prayer," it examines the psychological implications of modeling acts of service to men as an extension of how you serve God (on your knees).

an exercise in parting is a poetic examination of a go-go dancer walking home from work late at night attempts to resurrect her lost childhood on kiddie rides in front of a small store. Close-up images of the artist’s face collapse into abstraction as the pony ride breaks down. This film is part of the trilogy "Close, but no Cigar." [Overview Courtesy of Ayanna Dozier]