tl;dr

  • Get on Your Knees, Jesus Loves You is Ayanna Dozier's second solo exhibition at Microscope Gallery.
  • The exhibition includes a set of new hand-printed photographs and three short films that visualize her experience growing up in a Christian fundamentalist church.
  • In printing her original photography onto leather, Dozier emphasizes the physicality of her images, which she describes as “flesh on literal flesh.”

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Microscope Gallery, a contemporary art gallery in New York that is known for its focus on moving image art, opened a solo exhibition on Ayanna Dozier, a Brooklyn-based filmmaker and artist. Titled Get on Your Knees, Jesus Loves You, this is Dozier's second solo exhibition at Microscope Gallery. The show includes a set of new photographs hand-printed by the artist onto different types of leather and three short films that visualize her experience growing up in a Christian fundamentalist church.

Dozier draws on her formative teenage years to analyze and deconstruct the repressive mechanisms that define ecclesiastical hierarchies, addressing the themes of submission, autonomy and self-care. Through a series of black and white photogravures imprinted from her original photography onto leather, Dozier emphasizes the physicality of her images, which she describes as “flesh on literal flesh.”

A blurry film frame with five figures embracing each other, with a man in the middle being held by his arms and with a hand around his neck.
Ayanna Dozier, A Whore in the House of the Lord, 2025, 16mm film, 11 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Microscope Gallery, New York.

In the 16mm installation Genesis 38:14-15, Dozier threads a single film through multiple projectors. The moving image depicts the artist performing a pole dance to James Turrell's installation Sky Pesher, the dance symbolically reclaiming and desacralizing the light and sky in Turrell's work.

In another film work, Doing it for Daddy, shot on double 8mm film strips, the images are projected in such a manner that they recall the mullioned windows of Gothic cathedrals. In each of the windows Dozier recreates two narratives from her life that run in parallel: her work as an erotic dancer; and the washing and anointing of her pastor's feet in church.

In the 11-minute single-channel film A Whore in the House of the Lord, pious church girls portrayed by the artist's friends come face to face with their repressed sexuality and fascination with a female sex worker who, to their indoctrinated minds, channels the demonic through her presence.

Ayanna Dozier grew up in Riverside, California. Her practice revolves around performance, experimental film, printmaking and photography. Through these disciplines she examines the mechanisms behind transactional intimacy and Black feminist experiences.

Get on Your Knees, Jesus Loves You is open through May 31, 2025 at Microscope Gallery. More on this and other exhibitions at the gallery can be found on their site.

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