Ayanna Dozier
This Country Makes it Hard to Fuck
February 2 – March 11, 2023
Opening Thursday February 2, 6-8PM
Installation Views
Selected Press:
Must See, Artforum
New York Times, by Jill Steinhauer
Microscope is very pleased to welcome Ayanna Dozier back to the gallery for her first solo exhibition titled “This Country Makes it Hard to Fuck.”
In new and recent works in celluloid film and film photography Dozier addresses through personal experience and performances for the camera the way the media, culture, politics, and religion work to exert control over bodies and stifle sexuality. Additionally, the artist foregrounds the manners in which black femmes and other individuals of color are disproportionately targeted by these systems.
Dozier’s photographic images from the series “How to Set Fire to a Small Building, Safely” (2022) wryly respond to her recent two-and-a-half years experience with cancerous cells in her cervix. The artist associates her ordeal, which also included multiple surgeries, with her mother’s decision to withhold the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine for religious beliefs during her preteen years.
In striking black & white still-life compositions — shot on large format film and completed as platinum prints hand-developed by the artist on gampi paper or on leather — Dozier seeks to make “the intimate political and social through a re-composition of [her] corporeality.” The photographs propose subtly jarring juxtapositions of everyday items such as cut flowers or a tea cup and saucer with sexual ephemera, including condoms containing the bodily fluids of partners of the artist (with their consent), as well as other contraceptives, testing kits for sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and HPV, as well as medical and surgical tools. The title of the series alludes to the artist’s activities as a small time teenage-age arsonist, which she views as a response to a restrictive household.
Three new short 16mm films, which together form a trilogy titled “Close, but no Cigar,” feature Dozier in the role of each of the unrelated protagonists. Taking aesthetic inspiration from 1970s ads and soft porn, the artist questions the way information about gender and sexuality is disseminated and received, purposefully failing to satisfy the viewer’s expectations in each.
In the 3-minute film “A Picture for Parco,” Dozier recreates a 1980s commercial made for the 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 hard boiled 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.
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 the artist’s version, the woman, who is seen bathing in a bikini in a heart-shaped bath, unsuccessfully attempts to embrace “superficial happiness, femininity and passiveness.”
“an exercise in parting” is a poetic 4-minute work in which 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. Cose-up images of the artis’s face collapse into abstraction as the pony ride breaks down.
Photographs and a Super 8mm portrait film from the series “It’s Just Business, Baby” reflect upon the histories of body labor in the Meatpacking and Chelsea districts as sites for sex clubs, sex work, and other sexual activity. 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.” A chromogenic print on metallic paper “The Taste of Your Skin,” is the most visceral of the works on view, depicting an assemblage of wax and raw meat.
The title of the exhibition, “This Country Makes it Hard to Fuck,” is taken from a lyric from “This Country” by Fever Ray, which examines how systemic oppression complicates individuals’ pursuit of love and sex. The soundtracks of the films in the series “Close, but no Cigar” were made in collaboration with Nava Dunkelman.
“Ayanna Dozier: This Country Make it Hard to Fuck” opens Thursday February 2nd and continues through Saturday March 11th. Opening Reception: Thursday February 2nd, 6-8pm.
For further information please contact the gallery at info@microscopegallery.com or by phone at 347.925.1433.
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Ayanna Dozier is a Brooklyn-based artist. Her art practice includes film (both motion picture and still), performance, and installation work. Her work has been exhibited at The Shed, New York, NY; Fragment Gallery, New York, NY; Westbeth Gallery, New York, NY; BRIC Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; and the Block Museum of Art, Evanston, IL amongst other venues. Her films have been screened at festivals including Open City Docs (2020), BlackStar (2021), Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival (2021), Prismatic Ground (2022) and Aesthetic Film Festival where she was the recipient of Best Experimental in 2020 for her film “Softer.” She was a 2022 Wave Hill Winter Workspace Resident, a 2018-2019 Helena Rubinstein Fellow in Critical Studies at the Whitney Independent Studies Program, and a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow from 2017-2022 at Whitney Museum of American Art.
