Trina Merry, an artist known for her innovative work in contemporary fine art body painting, is taking on gender equality and body image in one of her recent works.
Merry’s urban camouflage series paints over bodies so they merge with the surrounding landscape.
Recently, Merry merged Meara Rose, a body-positive influencer, into the landscape of The World Trade Center Oculus in New York City.
The Oculus--a bright, light-filled, architectural beauty--serves as a transportation hub located at Ground Zero, where the twin towers fell during 9/11. It invokes hope, redemption, and freedom.
The architect, Santiago Calatrava, intended the structure to look like, “a bird being released from a child’s hand.”
Merry’s work takes a topless Rose and paints her into the Oculus, the outline of her body just visible. She becomes the Oculus but is still embodied within herself.
The work was meaningful to Rose.
She thought it was an act of “desexualizing nudity.”
New York City is one of 14 cities in the U.S. that has been, “top tested,” according to Gotopless.org, meaning it’s one of 14 cities that women have been topless in without persecution.
Since 1992, it’s been legal for women to be topless in New York State wherever a man is allowed to be topless.
Rose, who is a plus-sized model, described the work as a form of empowerment. “It's okay to have a body and no matter what it looks like, it's still beautiful,” she said of her experience working with Merry. “We are all art.”
The work not only normalizes Rose’s body, it celebrates it by melding Rose into the Oculus, an already famous piece of art.
Rose touches on Merry’s purpose as outlined in her artist’s statement.
Merry herself was a model for body painting before she took her own to brush to others. She was struck by lightning while driving in Los Angeles. The effect made being around electricity painful.
While she healed, musician Amanda Palmer suggested that Merry participates in the opening act for Palmer’s then band (the Dresden Dolls).
Merry stood on stage, nude, and was body painted. The experience gave her a new perspective on art. “Art had a heart beat. Art could be vulnerable. Art was… happening,” writes Merry in her artist’s statement.
Since then body painting has played a central role in Merry’s work.
By using a living canvas, Merry feels as though her art is more effective when discussing issues such as race, gender, and body image, according to an article from The Argonaut. Painting nude women, in particular, allows her to reclaim the feminine body from the male gaze.
Rose stated that as soon as she found out about Merry’s art she knew she had to work with her. According to Rose, there still isn’t a huge demand for plus-sized modeling in New York City.
While being painted into the Oculus, she felt free and liberated. “And to be camouflaged and immortalized into this building felt really, really, cool and important because I'm not used to seeing architecture like that in my daily life,” she said.