Exhibition
Clarity Haynes. Altar-ed Bodies
3 Jan 2020 – 25 Jan 2020
Regular hours
- Friday
- 11:00 – 18:00
- Saturday
- 11:00 – 18:00
- Tuesday
- 11:00 – 18:00
- Wednesday
- 11:00 – 18:00
- Thursday
- 11:00 – 18:00
Address
- 39 Lispenard St
- New York
New York - 10013
- United States
Denny Dimin Gallery is pleased to co-present Altar-ed Bodies, a solo exhibition of paintings by Clarity Haynes with New Discretions (Benjamin Tischer of INVISIBLE-EXPORTS.)
About
An altar is a such a heavy thing, thick with intentions. It exists in every culture, sometimes simply, but more often rich with offerings. An altar holds a lingering connection with the divine feminine, often serving as a strategy for resistance and a space of empowerment outside of major patriarchal religions. It is a valuable tool.According to author and folklorist Kay Turner, “In the 1970s, artists involved in the radically revisionist spirit of the growing Feminist Art Movement defiantly elected to ignore the conventional distinction between ‘fine’ art and women’s ‘domestic’ art. They discovered altar-making as part of a reinvigoration of the domestic sphere, reclaiming it as a determining frame for practices that inscribe women’s creativity and subjectivity.” She quotes art historian Arlene Raven, who explains that these artists came to “underline the artistic nature of all forms of altar-making by women. The altar viewed as aesthetic model, performance genre, artistic object, and women’s art — the very acknowledgement of the existence of the altar — begins to change our traditional white, male, Western-bound ideas concerning who the artist is, and how and to what purpose, she creates.”
Raven also says, “The altar, by definition of its form and use, is an artistic implement for getting and giving power. By acknowledging the legitimacy of the altar as a woman’s art form we further legitimize and encourage a feminist understanding of art: that for us the assembly of images is not mere representation but a potent means towards realization of a new culture which both criticizes patriarchy and transforms it.”
Clarity Haynes is known for her long-standing explorations of the torso as a site for painted portraiture. Works in her Breast Portrait Project, always painted from life and usually monumental in scale, have focused on themes of healing, trauma, and self-determination. The new works continue this practice, but also reveal creative and colorful strategies her portrait subjects use for claiming, re-claiming, and altering the body. Surgeries, tattoos, scarification, piercings and hand-made jewelry adornments feature in these paintings. The exhibition debuts Haynes’ recent large-scale portrait of the pioneering bodycentric artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.
In addition to the torso portraits, Haynes will premiere a new series of trompe l’oeil altars. While the bodies tell the intimate stories of other people, the altars are self-portraits of sorts, made up of mementos and power objects collected by the artist over decades. Art and inspiration are a theme. A photograph of an ancient Medusa sculpture and a painting of a dinner plate from Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party” appear depicted in the same space. (The Dinner Party is arguably contemporary art’s penultimate feminist altar.)
Feminist and queer craft practices are honored in this celebratory body of work. Bright colors, lively compositions and multiple narratives conjoin in the depictions of both bodies and altars, while realist techniques playfully gesture to the surface of the painting through the mimetic description of surfaces shown.