One woman who came into Ken Solomon's art studio in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn hadn't had a cigarette in 17 years.

When she put on the big, wiry black wig that Solomon got her to pose in as part of a massive art project, the woman looked in the mirror at her newly bewigged self and said, "THIS person needs to smoke."

She lit up.

The wig lit up a lot of people and brought them out of their shells, said Solomon, who took pictures of nearly 2,000 people wearing it over the course of six years.

"It's the magic wig," Solomon said. "My grandmother put it on and all of a sudden it was like she was 24, a little sex symbol."

The only instructions were to pose in the wig (with a new shower cap underneath each time) and do what you need to do to be comfortable so that Solomon could take your picture.

The wig loosened inhibitions and pushed people to test creative impulses.

Men put on lipstick. Women took off their clothes.

One woman spent hours in the corner of Solomon's studio making herself up to look like she had been beaten. That was her wig persona. Some brought costumes or props. A clown's nose. A cigar. Hats. Scarves.

Solomon got wig pictures of babies and seniors -- his oldest was 93 -- whites, blacks, Dominicans, Hassidic Jews and a handful of local marijuana-smoking high school kids who came back repeatedly, each time with new interested friends.

All the models had one thing in common: They were intrigued through word-of-mouth, or by one of the flyers Solomon had hung all over Williamsburg.

One was a "Where's Waldo" picture, with Waldo in the wig. Another parodied the movie "Sixth Sense," reading, "I see wigs on people."

A final video installation, which presented many of the photos, included a soundtrack compiled from the phone messages the models had left in response to Solomon's fliers. It went up in October 2005 at the Josee Bienvenu Gallery in Manhattan.

The inspiration: One year for Halloween, Solomon dressed up as TV painter Bob Ross, best known for his bushy hair and his "happy little trees." That's when he first bought the wig. Then -- why not? -- he wore it for his driver's license photo.

"The idea was like -- you know what? I can be that guy," Solomon said. It felt so good, so liberating, he wanted to share the experience with others.

"I was like, let's pull it out of everybody," Solomon said. "Let's see what it does."

So he did. He pulled it out of nearly 2,000 people, all of them probably the better for it.

The end finally came when the wig got nappy, Solomon said.

While he had always thought of it as a "blank slate of outrageous," he started noticing too many people putting it on and talking like a Rastafarian.

He realized it was over -- it was no longer a blank slate. It had become "kind of outrageous, but Jamaican."

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REPETITION AND PATIENCE IN OTHER PROJECTS:

Solomon's art projects involve the kind of discipline of repetition that would feel torturous to almost anybody else. Here are some examples.

• BLEW LINE: Solomon took pictures of red lines everywhere he saw one -- on the edge of a shoe, on the side of a police car -- and strung them together so that one picture fades into another while the red line stays constant. See a video showing the project here: http://tinyurl.com/fp8m5
• THE AGING PROJECT: An ongoing project that involves taking a picture of himself every single day for years to document his aging process. Solomon has assembled almost three years' worth as a slideshow: http://tinyurl.com/hszgs
• 10 HOURS ON THE TUBE: Exactly what it sounds like. Solomon spent 10 hours in the same seat on the subway taking candid pictures of the stream of people taking the seats in front of him: http://tinyurl.com/zooct
• JACK OF HEARTS: A jack playing card made from tiny, cut-up pieces of dollar bills: http://tinyurl.com/gagfz
• STARS AND STRIPES: An envelope, sent through the mail with meticulously drawn stamps -- recreations of the original in the corner: http://tinyurl.com/h6mbj

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Hillary Rhodes is an asap reporter in New York.

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