The Roof: Softness, worked

For the closing of Marissa Delano's Depraved Family!!!!! exhibition, Third Born presents a final guided tour, a screening of It's Just Business, Baby (Ayanna Dozier, 2024) and a conversation between Oona Zyman and Lia Quezada.

This screening marks the launch of THE ROOF—a series of education programming within the gallery’s roof space that further contextualizes exhibitions through themes of community, transformation, and resilience. SOFTNESS, WORKED curated by Oona Zyman, brings together the voices of artists, Marissa Delano and Ayanna Dozier, whose shared histories in the sex work industry create points of connection across themes of sexuality, gender, power, and care—while each speaks from lived experience, turning personal history into political presence.

Drawing from a legacy of surveillance and voyeurism, Dozier reclaims the erotic body as a site of agency and resistance. Her analog films unfold without dialogue, allowing image, gesture, and breath to carry weight. What does it mean to love—or to be loved—within the logic of transaction? What does it feel like to pay for touch, for care, for closeness?

Ayanna Dozier’s (b. 1990, Riverside, California) It’s Just Business, Baby (2024) is a silent trilogy that speaks volumes. A kiss. An embrace. Two people walking hand-in-hand through the streets of Chelsea and Tribeca—neighborhoods once marked by sex work, clubs, and illicit intimacy. These are moments we witness but cannot fully enter. Intimacy here is not for us; it belongs to the people living it. The camera lingers, yet holds back. It watches, but does not possess.

Rather than frame sex work as exploitation, Dozier opens space to consider it as labor rooted in care, bodily autonomy, and survival. For Dozier, intimacy is both embodied and archived, private and public, deeply personal and politically charged.

–Third Born

RSVP