PENUMBRA WORKSPACE PROGRAM | New York City-Based Artist | 2024
Ayanna Dozier
Image © Ayanna Dozier. Courtesy of the artist.
“My work aims to name and make visible what Toni Morrison describes as the unspeakable or illegible acts of history that are erased by systems of white supremacist patriarchy. Across Polaroids, film (16mm motion picture and large format still), printmaking, and research, I look at the lives of sex workers, erased histories, medical injustice, and sexual justice to make images for those underrecognized 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 formal and narrative experimentation.”
Ayanna Dozier (PhD) is a Brooklyn-based artist-writer. Her art practice centers performance, experimental film, printmaking and photography, using auto-fiction, surrealist, conceptual, and feminist methods. Following the conviction of the Pictorists, she approaches photography and filmmaking as process-based mediums that emphasizes the tension of analogue materiality in the era of mass digital mediation and production. Across her photographic practice, she foregrounds the histories of various forms of body labor that include sex work, sex clubs, reproductive justice, and “illicit” sexual activity that are often criminalized in society. She makes narrative portraits that embrace artifice and forgoes any attempt to “authentically” represent her, or others’ experiences to both reflect upon the slippery, fallible nature of memory as well as the desire to aestheticize personal trauma into something one can confront.
Select exhibition and screenings include; Hauser & Wirth (Los Angeles), PLATFORM Centre (Winnipeg), Microscope Gallery (New York), The Shed (New York), BAM (New York), Block Museum (Chicago), and Aesthetica Film Festival (York, U.K.) where she was the recipient of best experimental film (2020). Her visual art is in the permanent collection of The Whitney Museum of American Art and is represented by Microscope Gallery. She is currently an assistant professor in communication, emphasis in film, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and is the author of Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope (2020).
SPONSORS
This program is supported by Henry Nias Foundation, Joy of Giving Something, The Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation, and Roz Leibowitz.
