Since 2012, artists Blake Jacobsen (Art BFA 17) and Meghan Sabik have collaborated on photography, video, performance, and installation work that examines desire, authorship, gender performance, and the unstable relationship between artist and muse. Their work now appears throughout Gregg Araki’s new film, I Want Your Sex, which opened in theaters nationwide on July 31.
Starring Olivia Wilde, Cooper Hoffman, and Charli xcx, the film follows Elliot (Hoffman), an unmotivated twentysomething who lands a job with renowned artist and provocateur Erika Tracy (Wilde. When she takes him on as her sexual muse, he is drawn into a volatile relationship that tests his desires, boundaries, and existing relationships, eventually pulling him into a world of obsession, betrayal, and murder.
Jacobsen and Sabik licensed more than 25 original photographs and two video works for the production. They also created new pieces specifically for the film’s fictional art world and worked with the art department on the selection, installation, and presentation of artwork across the sets.
Works prominently featured in the finished film include photographs from the duo’s series Curious Couple Seeking Third on ModelMayhem.com; the two-channel digital video Transgressive Heterosexual Video Art Piece; and SEX Xerox, a large-scale installation composed of erotic photocopies printed on neon-pink paper.
“I saw Blake and Meghan’s work as muses, both in a literal and fictional sense,” said producer Seth Caplan. “They helped inspire the creative team and contributed to shaping the realism of the artistic world we were building. Their deep understanding of the Los Angeles art scene, and their ability to translate its ethos with both authenticity and irony, brought additional depth to the film’s storytelling.”
Jacobsen and Sabik have long explored many of the same questions at the center of I Want Your Sex. Their collaborative practice draws on traditions that treat the body as both subject and site of critique, with performance, intimacy, and labor serving as central artistic materials.
In 2017, Jacobsen and Sabik co-founded PSLA, an artist-run space that presents exhibitions and programs with an emphasis on lens-based artists. In addition to their work as a duo, both artists maintain individual practices. Jacobsen previously worked in the CalArts Library and Archives and taught in the Photography and Media program. He is currently a lecturer in Photography and Expanded Media at the University of Georgia.
