Birth Scenes in Body Horror Movies Have Nothing on Clarity Haynes’s “Portals” at New Discretions

A minuscule flushed hand with five chubby fingers sticks out of a slick reddened birth canal as if waving from a seeping open wound. A rubber-gloved palm grabs the neck of a splotchy greenish-purple head, its rubbery face smushed and eyes slammed shut with yellow viscous fluid running from its nose. Another grumpy face, this time in a blue wash, peeks from genitalia with a cone-shaped skull as if reflected in an obstetrician’s fun house mirror. Elsewhere, a ropy rose umbilical cord, the watery grey extraterrestrial form of an intact amniotic sac, and countless round heads emerging from swollen orifices smeared with blood—so much blood on raised asses, spread thighs, and rounded stomachs. This is birth—or really, crowning—as represented by artist Clarity Haynes, all on a kitschy pink heart-shaped canvas.

Entitled Blood Altar, this painting, on view in Haynes’s current exhibition Portals at New Discretions, may be one of the most confrontational paintings I’ve ever seen. Though I dropped an image of it up top, the work doesn’t accurately translate in jpg form. In the gallery, the oversized heart hangs low, eye level, sucking viewers in to notice one alarming image, then another, and another. Oh my god, look at that one!! The only comparison I can make here is watching a mashup of body horror birth imagery in movies: Geena Davis pushing out a larva in a nightmare sequence in The Fly, the alien baby bursting from a chest, only to skitter away, in Alien, the (hilarious) birth of Freddy Kruger in Nightmare on Elm Street 5, all those cracking noises in Huesera: The Bone Woman, and, the most recent addition, Sydney Sweeney’s nun Cecilia screaming, her face caked with blood in closeup, while giving birth in the last few minutes of Michael Mohan’s Immaculate.

Like these scenes, Blood Altar comes with a heavy dose of camp. As cheesy and tacky as a heart-shaped pool, tub, or bed, all of which remind me of Jayne Mansfield’s camp mastery, the form of the canvas, combined with its cell-like bursts of shocking, gushing, life-bearing imagery, is an inherently humorous collision like a Valentine’s Day card covered in happy horrors. You won’t see this at Hallmark! Add its implied collage element with Haynes’s rendering of a piece of blue masking tape and the work becomes even more amusing—a crowning mood board! Despite my general glee at Blood Altar‘s more provocative elements, it would be a mistake to overlook the seriousness with which Haynes treats birth imagery, both formally and conceptually. Throughout Portals, Haynes showcases a part of life, quite literally the emergence of life itself, that is still taboo in visual representations.

Not only the centerpiece—and mic drop—of the exhibition, Blood Altar sits at the crossroads of the two series most prominently displayed in Portals: the Crowning and Altar series. Rather than a visual barrage like Blood Altar, Haynes’s other Crowning paintings focus on one birth, ranging from monumental canvases to teeny-tiny six-inch peephole ones about the size of the snapshots in Blood Altar. There are other shaped canvases too like the Renaissance throwback tondo Origin II, a more literal interpretation of the mystical labor implicated by the title of Gustave Courbet’s horny The Origin of the World. Like Courbet, Haynes forgoes any defining features of the person giving birth—just a relatively tight pussy shot with shaking thighs akimbo. That doesn’t mean she isn’t portraying these anonymous bodies with care. Like her paintings of torsos, which celebrate the juts and folds of fat rolls and dangling breasts, the stitched remains and indentations of mastectomy and top surgery scars, and the tattoos and sun damage that become defining features, Haynes zeroes in on stretch marks and heavy linea nigra on pregnant bellies, seen from a bizarre angle below (a view mostly familiar to midwives), and the engorged transformation of labial lips. In particular, the larger canvases feature more gestural brushstrokes, most noticeable on pubic hair intersecting with a newborn’s wispy head. Strangely, I found these bigger Crowning paintings easier to take than the miniature ones as this more obvious painterly quality created some distance from the spurts of birthing juices and blood, even if I did come face to face with a puckered pink asshole in Big Birth II (Night).

That wrinkled anus is winkingly reflected in an adjacent Altar painting, Fire Altar, in which a mound of striped red, orange, magenta, and pink fabrics, occasionally fringed, culminate in a pinned trompe-l’œil round red and black scrunchie or knit coaster (who can say) on a triangular canvas. These Altar works, hung alongside and between the Crowning ones, also deal with queer matriarchal lineages. The paintings consist of precisely placed collections of knickknacks, doodads, snapshots, fabrics, ripped-out pages from ancient art history textbooks, crystals, and other thingies that, taken together, act as a devotional arrangement to various inspirations, influences, and communities. Some imagery directly references well-known artists such as the raised arms of the figure in Full Moon Altar that recalls Ana Mendieta’s Silueta works. Yet what isn’t a clear nod to an art forebear contains enough yoni imagery like the curtains that flank the jewel-embedded oval pendant in Birthday Altar to assert Haynes’s point—that not all mothers are the ones pooting us out. We pick some up along the way too.

Granted, these Altar paintings get a tad lost in the more eye-popping imagery of the Crowning series. Though a breather is not unwelcome, it’s hard to compete with blood snaking out of spread vaginas or a baby’s contorted face slipping into existence with an open-mouthed grimace in Big Birth III (J’s Birth), looking a bit like Nick Zedd’s alien abomination Entities paintings. That baby J is scholar, writer, and curator Jeanne Vaccaro. Painted from a photograph provided by Vaccaro’s parents, this portrait is so astonishingly intimate that it even makes me uncomfortable, a nearly impossible feat that should be celebrated. I consider myself heroically unflappable but imagining a portrait of me screaming into the world out of my mother’s hoohah—or in my case, yanked by forceps (I didn’t arrive willingly)—shakes me to my core.

This dual feeling of discomfort and admiration is likely explained by the sheer lack of imagery we still have of crowning whether in visual art or amateur photography (though that is changing as the source material for Blood Altar attests). Even in 2024, when it seems as if everything has been done and seen, birth is sanitized—all those loving photographs of new parents in black and white so you don’t notice the soup of blood, shit, and other fluids floating around the home birth pool. Let’s face it, birth is a violent and painful and grody affair. So much so that even Immaculate’s final birth scene doesn’t actually show the birth itself. That somehow would have exceeded viewers’ tolerance, more so than gnawing through an umbilical cord like a tough meaty Twizzler. The imagery is that transgressive—or must be. Images of crowning are so verboten that Haynes frequently has to post her work on Instagram with the caveat, “This is a painting of birth,” as an attempt to thwart social media censors. It doesn’t always work.

This isn’t to say there aren’t any vivid images of birth in contemporary visual art. Essays in Haynes’s corresponding catalogue include references to Carmen Winant’s installation My Birth at MoMA and Judy Chicago’s Birth Project. Just a few blocks up from New Discretions, Pace Gallery, if you can get past their new paranoid bag checks, currently showcases Loie Hollowell’s Dilation Stage, which abstracts the process of dilation and visualizes the radiating pain of contractions. Though much less raw than Haynes’s paintings, Hollowell’s exhibition is still a visceral experience, particularly if you view the series with your ass plopped awkwardly on the white birthing bench Hollowell created in collaboration with her husband Brian Caverly. However, the most resonant comparison that comes to mind with Haynes’s work is Heji Shin’s Baby photographs that similarly capture crowning, a series that once prompted an art advisor, according to The New York Times, to exclaim: “Are you kidding?” She wasn’t—and neither is Haynes who is as fascinated with the formal nature of birth as the physical transformation itself. As Haynes says in the gallery’s press release, “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.” Me too. I should note, though, that there is a real possibility some viewers will have a negative response to these paintings because of their own experiences with birth trauma. Things can go massively awry during birth and many are left on their own to deal with the fallout. This is a critical perspective I’d be very interested to hear as I have never birthed a child (neither has Haynes). Nor do I plan to, especially after looking at these paintings. Eesh! Count me out!

What I can do is consider the utter strangeness of the crowning moment Haynes pinpoints. In the exhibition’s catalogue and press release, a lot is made of the space Haynes provides for queer, trans, and non-binary bodies. In fact, the only drawing in the show Chair Birth Study seems to faintly depict the figure with binding on their chest. Haynes disrupts more binaries than just gender. For instance, is a painting like Crowning XII of one person or two? It’s both and neither—a split second when parent and child are one. Birth is one of the two major transitions in life; the other being death, which is also a sore subject for most visually yet is much more frequently depicted. Just look at how many violent images make it through the Instagram censors as opposed to Haynes’s paintings.

Why is that? Is it because there is less sex tied up in death? Is it because vaginas should only be seen as pleasurable rather than, as the exhibition title indicates, a portal imbued with the power of creation? Is it because birth reminds us that humans are truly animals? Or maybe we all don’t like thinking about our own mother’s reddened cooter shooting us out? Or is it just the sheer amount of blood and gunk spewing out of a typically comfortably erotic orifice that has everyone feeling a bit too queasy? I prefer the notion Haynes poses within Harry Dodge’s catalogue essay that these images are akin to Medusa’s head, swapping a head full of snakes for curly-cued pubes. Dodge understands this “to mean something wicked, dangerous to look at, occulted—and thus mesmeric.” And Haynes’s paintings do contain a terrifying and alluring untamable power that is, at once, frightening, grotesque, and transfixing. I guess that’s why so many pass out in the delivery room.