Clarity Haynes: Origins of Our Unworlding
Wells Chandler April 8. 2024
Installation view of Clarity Haynes: Portals at New Discretions, New York (courtesy of the artist and New Discretions, photo Tom Powel Imaging)
Everyone starts out fisting their mother. An infant’s crowning head transforms a pussy into a size queen chode. Sites of pleasure and sites of pain swell and contract. Daddies and everyone located in-between the gender binary give birth too. A micro-penis becomes a double pronged dildo as newness enters the fold. Either way someone is getting double fisted and so much more in the life-bearing paintings of Clarity Haynes. That is the delightful and polymorphously perverse reality of being born. These paintings reposition birth as a queer incestuous sex act. Collectively we are all complicit in performing this taboo. Perverts and proud of it, the sacred collapses into the profane. It or ‘we’ in the Genesis P-Orridge modality of the pronoun are alive!
Clarity Haynes, “Origin II” (2022) oil on canvas 48 x 48 inches
Haynes’ Portals are sites of our unworlding. Unworlding is a queer endeavor to unbuild, unmake, dismantle and undo. Haynes is an expert in this labour of love. A former Lesbian Avenger, there is not a better sister outsider doing the Lorde’s work. Queer people have a long history of being involved in creating life where others have claimed impossibility to exist. Liberation is a kind of birth. Like birth, liberation is psychologically terrifying and physically painful; it is simultaneously joyful and has a visceral impact on the body. Liberation is often resisted by those who have accepted or have only known oppression as the standard.
Clarity Haynes, “Crowning V”, “Crowning XII” & “Crowning X” (2021, 2022 & 2022) oil on board 6 x 6 inches
Haynes is a freedom fighter and that is not an easy task. Cleaving birth from the domain of heteronormative futurity, Hayne’s paintings are purifying mirrors that reframe gendered trauma, allowing us to experience bodies and rituals in a fresh way. They are literal portals for the mind to unmake implanted agendas that subjugate our ability to inhabit queer futurity. Shown in tandem with the birth paintings, the altars are potent midwives welcoming new life into an affirming realm of queer feminist mysticism.
Clarity Haynes, “Full Moon Altar” (2020) oil on canvas 40 x 40 inches
Gender happens to us. Emerging with their sex obfuscated from interrogation, the babies in these paintings eschew clinical binary assignment. In doing so, Haynes depicts and points to birth as a queer act where our origins are unworlded. Birth is a non-site where we turn a corner.
Clarity Haynes, “Blood Altar” (2023) oil on canvas 40 x 40 inches
The pregnant body is a queer Russian nesting doll of literal gender-fuck fluidity. We are trans-species and breathe in this fluid state, amniotic, to be more specific. The pregnant body queers architecture by unbuilding its relationship from something external to an internal embodied state. Some birthing parent’s choose to eat their baby’s house. This act of cannibalism further dismantles structure. The oral as a site to create new worlds is undone through a clearing by consumption. Placenta as entangled ecology is simultaneously hippie sacrament and the sacred canopy of our unworlded beginnings.
Clarity Haynes, “Big Birth II (Night)” (2022) oil on canvas 70.5 x 60 inches
The birthing parents in these paintings push unworlding further. The cropping of the figure transforms the body into something pod-like and alien as they complete the act of machinery fecundity. Cyborgian electricity of the Wachowski Sisters swirl with an Atwoodian dystopic nativity, allowing ritual to reverberate in the flesh of the cosmic egg. These paintings smell like matrix. Stretched labial folds literally and metaphorically shape shift into gilding that adorns the fabergé extraterrestrial gate. Crowning heads reminiscent of iridescent pearls and gemstones in every color of the rainbow bejewel in full spectrum glory as they hatch. The primordial being is pushed into existence. Haynes’ paintings remind us of the truth that we were all once queer and perhaps that is the reality of our existence and our key to survival.
Clarity Haynes, “Big Birth III (J’s Birth)” (2023) oil on canvas 70.5 x 60 inches
Clarity Haynes: Portals on dis-splayed at New Discretions (515 W 20th, 3rd Floor New York, NY 10011) through April 13. Be sure to pick up her book published in tandem with her exhibition.