Bardonia woman bares all for Spencer Tunick project

Cathy Marino is not afraid of baring it all.

Especially not all the various surgeries that have left her body scarred.

Marino, who lives in Bardonia, will be taking it all off on Saturday for artistic reasons and for personal reasons. She will be one of hundreds of models for artist Spencer Tunick's latest project.

An artist-in-residence at the Garner Arts Center, Tunick will photograph a group of volunteer models who will pose nude, briefly, in and around the former textile mill complex. Tunick is internationally known for his nude works, which often incorporate thousands of models.

Marino will be one of them.

"Not only do I admire his work, but I think this could be a great opportunity to get my story out there, too," Marino says.

Long story short, Marino writes: she was scheduled for a routine rhinoplasty on May 15, 2013, and ended up going into cardiac arrest. "And then I flatlined."

Rushed to Hackensack Medical Center, she had emergency heart surgery and a pacemaker and defibrillator implanted in her chest. She thought the story ended there. And if it had, chances are she may not have given Tunick's call out for volunteers a second thought.

"When I saw the notice posted I thought this installation was an opportunity for me to lose my inhibitions," says Marino, who is 36. "I am very guarded as far as showing people my scars and I will be totally nude with a bunch of strangers. But I thought, if I am ever going to feel comfortable in front of anyone, it would be Spencer Tunick. It's a powerful thing because I feel in control of everything."

Which hasn't been the case the last few years.

Soon after her heart surgery, Marino says she noticed a lump pressing against her defibrillator. Her doctors thought it was a hematoma and told her if it didn't clear up by itself in a few weeks, they'd schedule a draining.

She waited three weeks. By then the jelly bean-sized lump was the size of a golf ball: a biopsy and mammogram revealed Marino had breast cancer.

She couldn't initially have radiation because her tumor was pressed against the defibrillator and the radiation would have caused it to explode. So she underwent a second heart surgery to move the device to the other side of her chest. Her chemo ended in December 2013; radiation in March 2014, but then — just like that — 10 days later, she had another heart attack. '"My defib literally blew me across the room. I was rushed to the hospital for heart surgery No. 3."

To top it all off, she was also diagnosed with uterine cancer and had a full hysterectomy four weeks ago.

You could understand why Marino might not be up to spending hours posing nude with hundreds of similarly undressed strangers, but she says she thinks the experience will be liberating.

"For me to keep positive and keep going I have to literally keep moving," she says. "It does no good to be stagnant and depressing; I want to live life."

Tunick says many of those who pose for his work have expressed similar reactions.

"I found the act of participating, for the participants, started to become a very moving experience, not only physically, but mentally," he says. "You shed your clothing, but you get closer to issues of self worth; it's a confidence builder."

Marino says her family is 100 percent behind her. "My family think it's pretty amazing and courageous," she says, especially her 6-year-old daughter, Angelina. "She is the light at the end of my tunnel."

She's not entirely sure what to expect on Saturday. "I'm going to meet people with all types of different life experiences. I'm so looking forward to that," says the woman whose chest is criss-crossed with surgery scars. "If I have a story like this, God only knows what else is out there."

Arts festival

The May 23 Spencer Tunick installation is closed to the public, but Garner Arts Center will hold an art festival May 30 and 31.