One positive reaction to some of The Orange Man’s bizarre rants/idiology is a new solo exhibition of paintings by Clarity Haynes at the New Dimensions Gallery in NY.  The BODYOLOGY  show centers around large-scale torso portraits of queer and trans artists in Haynes’ circles.  Sitters include Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Alannah Farrell, Wells Chandler, Matteline DeVries-Dilling, and Linus Borgo. These influential contemporary artists explore trans joy, melancholy, glamor, erotics, disability, queer Black nonbinary identity, healing, grief, and creative self-fashioning in their own work, which Haynes honors in this exhibition. The evolution of the models in their lives, their work, and their self-definition is all part of the torso paintings.

“Our artistic oeuvres are inseparable from our bodies,” proclaims Haynes. Whether it is Jonathan Lyndon Chase’s chest tattoos of their own unmistakable drawings, Alannah Farrell’s tattoo commemorating their painter grandmother, Ginger Fox, or Wells Chandler’s layered charm necklaces from his life-altering travels in Tibet, Egypt and Thailand, this body of work demonstrates that the torso is a comprehensive site for portraiture; that the body is an altar; and that the body is art.