Clarity Haynes

“There are all these liquids and colors, there's blood and different fluids, sometimes it’s green, or yellow, you know, and that's what paint is too, liquid pigment. I'm surprised painters have not painted this subject more in art history actually.”

—Clarity Haynes

New Discretions is proud to present Portals, a solo exhibition of paintings by Clarity Haynes at our new gallery space in Chelsea.

Haynes’ new body of work focuses on the moment a person is brought into the world. Not the idealized, sanitized birth that is seen (or more pointedly not seen) in art history, but rather the bloody, raw, uncensored labor of it. Haynes, known for her long-standing Breast/Chest Portrait Project, continues to subvert the portraiture tradition through her Crowning series. The canvases pulse with corporeal detail; there is a viscosity that is both terrifying and captivating.

“I want the scale of my crowning paintings to be both very small, and larger-than-life,” states Haynes, “so that the viewer beholds the event of crowning as gemlike, sexy, precious, and powerful, enveloping, disturbing, beautiful and confrontational.” She revels in the abject and transcendent, relishing the materiality of paint to translate the chaos, blood and other fluids of birth. Her queer activist point of view shifts the gaze to a decidedly visceral, sensual engagement with paint, challenging our ideas of what bodies can be.

In addition to the crowning paintings, Haynes is also premiering several new trompe l’oeil altars, evoking earth, fire and spheres. These altars evoke spiritual sites of mortality and death as well as the ushering in of life. She pays tribute to feminist art history by incorporating colors, patterns, and motifs that allude to Louise Bourgeois, Miriam Schapiro, Ana Mendieta and Kiki Smith, as well as elements of medieval and Renaissance painting.

This exhibition claims space for queer, trans and birthing bodies, offering new perspectives on ancient themes. Opening portals in our imagination as we strive to survive in a landscape that is in many ways apocalyptic, this work, though dark, insists on joy.

Clarity Haynes (b. 1971, McAllen, TX) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and upstate New York. She holds an MFA in painting from Brooklyn College, a CFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and a BA from Temple University in film production. Her work has been widely exhibited, including at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Montclair Art Museum, Brandeis University’s Kniznick Gallery, and the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. She is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting, a Pollock-Krasner Award, a Community Arts Regrant Award from the Brooklyn Arts Council and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and residency fellowships from MacDowell and the Corporation of Yaddo. Her work has been discussed in The New York Times, Artforum, The New Yorker, Art in America, Artnews, and Hyperallergic, amongst others, and can be found in the permanent collections of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Leslie-Lohman Museum, the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, the Rena Rowan Breast Center of the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, and the Brooklyn Museum Feminist Art Base.