Head of Medusa, after Rubens

Look carefully and discover the world of Chadwick Gray & Laura Spector.

These two artists have been working with museums for many years, gaining access to storage facilities, working with the curators to find paintings (mostly 19th century female portraiture), documenting them, and Laura Spector subsequently recreating them on Chadwick Gray's body. The painting process takes between 6 and 18 hours, is then photographed and printed up to the size of the original art work, sometimes a large mural.

Employing the illusion of multistable perception the final photograph often keeps your eye wandering around and around the frame.

"The recreated paintings of these historic portraits recapture the subjects in their own moment in history. The resulting photographs reveal a unification of art combining antiquity, history and technology in a contemporary context."

Most museums seem to not want people viewing their hidden treasures. Then there's examples such as New York's Metropolitan Museum who claim they don't have a storage facility. Now, as Chadwick says, somewhat ironically they themselves have a body of work that hasn't been seen by the public. So the two award-winning artists are putting together an exhibition which will be shown initially at the Pratt MWP Arts Institute in Utica, NY and it is for this they are looking for crowd-funding to produce and frame the works. Information is available over at Kickstarter. Incidentally, Chadwick & Spector are offering one of my favorite rewards: for a pledge at a certain level, wine and cheese via Skype!

There's a TEDx lecture that's fun to watch, which includes a time-lapse video of a 15 hour painting, compressed to 45 seconds.

View the aCurator magazine full screen photo feature.