7:00 PM – Final walkthrough of Marissa Delano’s Depraved Family!!!!!
7:30 PM – Rooftop screening of the trilogy (17 min) It’s Just Business, Baby (2024) by Ayanna Dozier
8:00 PM – Conversation with Oona Zyman & Lia Quezada

Join us on 31 May for a special double feature evening to close out Marissa Delano’s solo exhibition Depraved Family!!!!! at THIRD BORN. 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.

WORKS

Bounded Intimacy
Super 8 Color
6 minutes, 2024

Bounded Intimacy (part of the trilogy It’s Just Business, Baby) explores the histories of body labor in Chelsea and Tribeca. It focuses on the seduction between a nameless woman and the camera. Their ambiguous relationship remains unknown and ambivalent, as the film captures the authenticity of desire between them.
Performers: Gabriella Garcia
Support: Michael Zumbrun

It’s Just Business, Baby
Super 8 Color
6 minutes, 2023

This titular film captures an encounter between a client and a working girl, where the lines of care become blurred following a session. The film repeats the scene with the actors switching roles to challenge the power dynamics within the relationship.
Performers: Nikki Sweet and Rosie Royale

Let’s Make Love and Listen to Death from Above (Parts 1 & 2)
Super 8 Color and B&W
6 minutes, 2023

Part of the trilogy It’s Just Business, Baby, these films examine cruising and public sex in Chelsea’s history. The absence of soundtrack encourages audiences to follow the image rather than sounds typically associated with sex.
Performers: Camilo Godoy and Jorge Sánchez

Marissa Delano is a self-taught artist and writer based in New York City. She holds a B.A. in Literature from Hunter College. Recent exhibitions include NADA & The Salon in Paris, NADA House in NYC, Barely Fair in Chicago, NADA Foreland in Catskill and P.A.D. in NYC and Miami. Recent residencies include Cobertizo (MX) and Virreina (COL). Her writing has appeared in Topical Cream, Serving the People (STP) and rivulet. She is the founder of Big Fat Baby (BFB) an outlet for artists to collaborate across divergent creative practices.

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. Her research on film navigates the history of distribution, archaeology, and radical work of Black feminist experimental filmmakers. While her current research and artwork is dedicated to examining how transactional intimacy (like sex work) redistributes care from the private sector into the public, social politics of relations. She is currently an assistant professor in communication, emphasis in film, at University Massachusetts, Amherst and is the author of Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope (2020).

Oona Zyman is a curator and art historian based in Vienna and Mexico City, holding an MA in Film & Screen Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work focuses on archives and time-based media in contemporary exhibitions. She recently co-curated PEACE NOW (2024) for Salzkammergut 2024 with Peter Noever Studio, featuring 28 international artists like Marina Abramović and Jenny Holzer. Oona has worked at the VIENNALE Film Festival, Krobath Wien gallery, and TBA21, contributing to publications such as The Commissions Book (2020). She also develops independent projects, including a residency with Nicolás Paris in Bogotá (2017) and co-curating Vienna’s XX Art Flânerie Festival (2021).

Lia Quezada  writes poetry and art criticism. In 2024, she founded Diamantina, an independent publisher dedicated to essays on art.