Over the past weeks body painter Trina Merry has been filling the streets of New York with body painted models – but good luck finding them. Using her brush to seamlessly camouflage their body into the world behind, she’s been painting her mostly nude subjects in front of famous landmarks like the Brooklyn Bridge, Guggenheim Museum, Empire State Building, Central Park and the New York City skyline.
Her process, which has often been compared to that of Beijing artist Liu Bolin, is a meticulous process requiring hours of patient, perfectly still posing from her models as she replicates the world beyond. The creation of each image requires her models to stand topless in the middle of a busy street (something the city’s fairly liberal public nudity laws allow), but the final image is far more concealing than revealing.
Merry found the inspiration for the series after relocating from San Francisco to New York earlier in the year:
“I wanted to engage the city and understand it and make some observations,” Merry says in SFGate. “So instead of a person right in front of the Empire State building or the Statue of Liberty, they’re softly in the background, and you’ve got more of a reflective view of the person within the landscape.”
See more of her work, including her viral Human Motorcycle Project, on her personal website.
