Olivia Wilde stars as fictional contemporary artist Erika Tracy in queer filmmaker Gregg Araki's I Want Your Sex. Her provocative artwork isn't just set dressing—it's essential to the character, helping establish Tracy as one of the film's most unforgettable creations.
The twist? None of it was created for the movie.
Instead, Araki built Erika Tracy's artistic world around more than a decade of work by queer artists Blake Jacobsen and Meghan Sabik. The duo contributed more than 20 photographic works, video pieces, installations, art consulting, and even appeared onscreen themselves, transforming years of their own work into the fictional body of art audiences see throughout the film.
I Want Your Sex producer Seth Caplan described the pair as "muses, both in a literal and fictional sense," noting that both their artwork and their knowledge of the Los Angeles art world helped shape the film's realism.
"The boundary between Erika's fictional practice and our own feels porous," Jacobsen and Sabik tell Out. "There was something genuinely generative about watching our practice become the history of a fictional transgressive artist."
Blake Jacobsen and Meghan Sabik created the real artwork behind Olivia Wilde's fictional artist Erika Tracy. Courtesy
Jacobsen and Sabik's collaboration began in 2012 during an e-commerce photo shoot for Lip Service, the influential Los Angeles punk, goth, and fetish fashion label. Blake had been hired as a photographer. Meghan was the model.
Instead of settling into a traditional photographer-and-model dynamic, the pair built an artistic partnership spanning photography, video, performance, installation, publishing, and an artist-run exhibition space.
That origin story also creates an unexpected full-circle moment. Lip Service's sex-positive, fetish-forward aesthetic helped shape the visual language of Gregg Araki's early films. More than a decade after Jacobsen and Sabik first met there, their artwork became the foundation of Olivia Wilde's fictional artist Erika Tracy in I Want Your Sex.
Creating Erika Tracy
First Place At The Very Competitive Fertility Goddess Casting, 2024
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Blake Jacobsen and Meghan Sabik's involvement went far beyond supplying artwork.
Working alongside the film's art department, they reviewed the script and early visual references, considered Erika Tracy's character psychology, conducted visual and art-historical research, and helped select, print, frame, curate, and install artwork across multiple sets.
"We are deeply grateful to Gregg for taking our work seriously and giving it such a meaningful place in the film," the artists tell Out. "We contributed more than twenty photographic works, multiple video pieces, and site-specific installations, so it was remarkable to watch thirteen years of our actual collaborative practice become the fictional oeuvre of Erika Tracy."
Inside Erika Tracy's gallery
Much of the artwork that viewers encounter throughout I Want Your Sex comes from Jacobsen and Sabik's long-running photographic series, Curious Couple Seeking Third, on ModelMayhem.com. Rather than serving as background decoration, the series helps establish Erika Tracy as an artist with a fully realized creative history.
One of several photographs from Curious Couple Seeking Third on ModelMayhem.com (2021–24), a series featured throughout Erika Tracy's fictional body of work.
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Beyond photography
Photography was only part of what the duo brought to the production.
Erika Tracy's fictional practice also incorporates excerpts from Transgressive Heterosexual Video Art Piece, Semiotics of the Sex Dungeon, and installations including SEX Xerox. Together, they create the sense that Erika works across multiple mediums — exactly what you'd expect from a celebrated contemporary artist.
SEX Xerox, 2024
From the studio to the screen
For audiences, Erika Tracy exists only inside I Want Your Sex.
But behind every photograph, video installation, and gallery wall is more than a decade of work by queer artists Blake Jacobsen and Meghan Sabik — a real artistic partnership that became the foundation of one of Gregg Araki's most memorable fictional creations.
