Halloween is supposed to be about embracing the sinister, but somewhere along the way, sinister became sexy. Enter the sexy Halloween costume. Artist Deborah Oropallo embraces this costume phenomenon in her layered photo-montages of subjects best known by their masterpiece museum portraits. For her series titled “Guise”, Oropallo superimposed pigmented photographic prints and acrylic painting in a way that makes her costumed subjects almost indistinguishable. If you look closely, suddenly, famous faces such as the Girl with a Pearl Earring become the Sexy Maid, Sexy Nurse, Sexy Circus Ringmaster, the list goes on. Men are not left out of the series, as we see in Oropallo’s cross-dressing of Pompeo Batoni’s Portrait of William Fermor. Like her other works, the result of these hybrid images is also somewhat androgynous and has inspired critics to label Oropallo as a “feminist”. Despite her work’s apparent nuances, the fact is that she does not intend to justify any political agenda- “Guise” is about exploring the relationship between body language and seduction, and finding out what happens when you disguise someone’s identity.
Los Angeles based artist 
Canadian artist 
First featured in 
In depicting the human condition,