Six people, body paint, and one motorcycle that is not actually there

Trina Merry describes her practice as using the human body as a brush or a surface. That is a precise description of a rare position: most painters treat the body as a subject, and most body painters treat it as a canvas for decoration. Merry treats it as construction material.

The Human Motorcycle Project, from 2012, is the clearest case. The red Ducati piece was assembled from six people and body paint, working closely with the manufacturer, with a custom-made red bike as the reference. The models contorted themselves into the shape of the machine, painted to match it, and the result is a photograph of a motorcycle that does not exist.

Why it only works from one place

Trompe l’œil painted onto a curved, moving, three-dimensional surface is a single-viewpoint illusion, and understanding that is understanding the whole technique.

Paint cannot change the shape of a shoulder. What it can do is put a highlight where a fuel tank’s highlight would fall, and a shadow where the tank’s shadow would fall, calculated for one specific position of the viewer and one specific direction of light. From that position the eye reads the painted cues before it reads the anatomy, and it assembles a tank.

Move two feet to the left and the cues no longer correspond to anything. The highlight is now in the wrong place for the actual geometry, the illusion drops out, and what is left is people with paint on them.

This has a consequence that is often misread. The photograph is not documentation of the artwork. The photograph is the artwork, because the viewpoint the illusion was constructed for is the camera’s. Anyone present in the studio saw a less impressive thing than anyone looking at the resulting image.

The constraint that shapes the work

The hard variable is not paint. It is time.

A person can hold an unnatural position for a limited period, and the limit falls quickly if the position loads a joint oddly or restricts breathing. Six people holding interlocking positions, each dependent on the others staying still, compounds the problem: any one of them shifting breaks the composition for all of them.

So the sequence has to be planned around endurance. Paint first, in a comfortable position, because painting takes far longer than the pose can be held. Rehearse the assembly. Then get into position, and shoot in the window available before somebody’s arm gives out. The number of people in a piece is limited less by the design than by how many simultaneous physical constraints can be sustained at once.

The rest of the practice

The motorcycle work is not representative of what Merry does, and the wider body of work is more pointed.

Her Urban Camouflage pieces camouflage painted figures into their environments, which inverts the motorcycle logic: instead of building an object out of people, it makes people disappear into a background.

Sweet Land of Liberty, in 2016, took that method to Washington, with eight trompe l’œil street performances staged in front of national landmarks including the White House, the Supreme Court and the Lincoln Memorial. Merry has described choosing the most iconic sites of power deliberately and working feminist themes into each piece.

Lust of Currency, from 2017, reinterpreted more than twenty of the most expensive artworks in the world using painted models blended into backdrops — a critique of the art market carried out by remaking its most valuable objects in the cheapest possible material.

Her stated concerns across the work are gender identity and equality, body image, and American consumerism. A motorcycle made of people, produced with the cooperation of the company that makes the motorcycle, sits somewhere inside that last theme, and it is not obvious whether it is a critique of it or an example of it. That ambiguity is probably the most interesting thing about the piece.

How she got here

Merry’s route into the work is unusual enough to explain some of it. She was born in Seattle in 1980 and moved to San Jose at twelve. She graduated from Azusa Pacific University in Los Angeles in 2002 with a bachelor’s degree in film, intending a film career: she interned for Mel Gibson and worked in art departments on films and television.

Two things in that biography matter for the finished pieces. An art department is where you learn to build something that only has to convince from where the camera is standing, which is precisely the discipline that a single-viewpoint body illusion requires. And a film training makes the photograph the primary artefact by default, rather than a record of a performance that happened elsewhere.

In 2005 she was struck by lightning and developed a sensitivity to electricity, and the effort to recover from that redirected her practice. It is the kind of detail that reads as colour in a profile and is probably load-bearing: an artist who moved from an electrically saturated industry into work whose only tools are pigment, bodies and daylight has a fairly direct reason for having done so.