With someone as prolific as artist-writer Ayanna Dozier, there’s no one way to experience the captivating works she creates.
Image courtesy of Ayanna Dozier.
Meet Multi-hypenate Ayanna Dozier. She has lots of feelings about New Jersey that she'd rather not get into, but at least one feeling she brings out in her work as a writer, photographer, performance artist, and filmmaker is intimacy. From the texture of her images to the layers of stories she builds in her films, Ayanna pulls us in and asks us to confront difficult questions about ourselves. Her Issue One piece entitled "What Remains: Exit 15x at Snake Hill" is a powerful tribute to those who were forced to live at the margins of society, and through her photographs, reconnects us to the land “in ways not visible nor permissible to the actual site.”
In this edition of “Getting Dense,” our video spotlight series, we ask Dozier a series of rapid-fire questions to help you get to know her a little better. Come along as Dozier shares what she’s listening to, what drew her to the potters’ fields at NJ Turnpike’s Exit 15X, who inspires her and her very relatable love-hate relationship with New Jersey.
The video highlights just a few of our questions, but you absolutely must read the full interview below.
DENSE: Please introduce yourself!
Ayanna Dozier: Hi, I’m Ayanna Dozier and I am an artist-writer. Specifically, I work across art criticism and art writing, as well as photography, film and installation work.
DENSE: Where are you right now?
AD: I’m currently in Brooklyn, New York.
DENSE: Which issue are you featured in and what's the title of your piece?
AD: So I'm featured in issue one and the title of my essay as well as a photograph that accompany it is entitled, “What Remains: Exit 15 X at Snake Hill.”
DENSE: And what was your piece about?
AD: So, my piece did a meditative exercise in trying to materialize, or just make tangible, the absence of the legacies of Snake Hill – specifically the black communities that lived in Snake Hill and the discarded communities.Those who have often been cast out, which includes the potter's field, which is a public burial ground for individuals who are legally un-befriended, but then also the asylums and the various mental institutions that essentially defined the community up until the early 20th century. I wanted to utilize photography – specifically large format photographs and palladium printing, which is an alternative printing process – and a meditative essay, to try to see how none of that is present when you go there now. It’s called Laurel [Hill] now, and there's a golf course, there's soccer, there's a park. These places of retreat and types of resort are often masking discarded histories, but specifically unsettled histories of abandonment for those who are most marginalized in society.
Laurel Hill playground, with Snake Hill in the background. Photo by Nikhil More.
DENSE: What are you reading these days?
AD: I'm currently reading a few pieces by Michael Tossing. I believe he just retired at Columbia University in the Department of Anthropology. His book “Walter Benjamin's Grave,” is a fascinating exercise in how we essentially brand the dead, or cannibalize the dead, through their archives, and fetishize the death of a scholar in hopes of becoming closer to the scholar that robs us of materially connecting with someone when they're alive. It's really helpful in helping me rethink my own archival practice and what my goals are when I want to do archival work and/or work with the dead.
DENSE: And what have you been listening to?
AD: Oh, I'm listening to a lot of things! My music taste are quite eclectic, but I love that! I'm quite mercurial in terms of what I like. So currently, I'm listening to Moloko, the UK band from the nineties and like early two thousands, on repeat. Along with their frontwoman Róisín Murphy when the band disbanded. She had an album that came out a few years ago called Róisín Machine, so that's on repeat as well. As well as Cocteau Twins, Azelia Banks, Janet Jackson, Portishead. It just goes on from there.
DENSE: Who inspires you artistically?
AD: I gain a lot of inspiration from artists who work definitely with conceptual practices, but who have a really robust cinematic practice as well. I'm currently revisiting the work of Maya Deren as well as Adrian Piper, and seeing where my own practice falls between the two. I think with both Deren and Piper specifically, that also influences my writerly practice.
I have a former scholarly practice though I'm no longer actively situated in academia. Maybe I'll return at some point, but at the moment I've taken a lot of what I've learned through research methodologies and pedagogical practices, and I'm using that to approach my art making and my kind of popular writing in the same way. I think that's what Piper and Deren were able to accomplish over the course of their lives, where they both were known – and are, as Piper’s still with us – for their intellectual rigor, as well as their theoretical experimentation with philosophy and their experimental practices across performance and film. Ultimately that's what I continue to work and rework across my work that also incorporates my own body.
So it's scattered! All of the different moving parts that I'm always attracted to inevitably become a singular object. I think that what’s half the fun, is trying to make it work. To problem-solve it, as it were.
DENSE: Tell us what you like to do in your downtime.
AD: I suppose just watching a good movie. Going to the theater and watching a good film is always a good way to spend time.
DENSE: How do you use New Jersey as a lens to see the world?
AD: [laughs] So the short answer is I don't. I would say that I have a rather antagonistic relationship to New Jersey. But in all honesty, that's actually quite superficial, right? Because there's a lot of New Jersey that has made its way into my work, Snake Hill being one of those examples. And forthcoming, I'm going to be going to New Jersey to shoot at a love motel in Cherry Hill, and in the past, I've gone to Atlantic City. I've also been fascinated with various histories of indigenous people, especially the Lenni Lenape tribe.
DENSE: So if you could describe New Jersey in one word, it would be --
AD: Outskirts! What interests me in New Jersey is the outskirts aspect of it, how all of these "discarded" things that were pushed out of New York City wind up there. It becomes a kind of portal to a fun house mirror, which I think entices me as an individual, as an artist, but it also repels me at the same time. I feel like as soon as I step off the train tracks, I'm very aware that I'm in New Jersey and I'm no longer in the city. So it is an uneasy tension, but I think ultimately it's something that I can't be too dismissive of, because the reality is that it's been a huge backdrop in a lot of my artistic practice.
DENSE: Do you have any tips on how to survive New Jersey?
AD: [laughs] Bring a knife? Joking!
DENSE: Can you leave us with any predictions you have about the future?
AD: [laughs] That it will end? Nothing is certain but death, so that’s one prediction where I'm 100% correct.
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