“Los Angeles is a contradiction of awe and terror. Freeways as monoliths, misbehaving faultlines. We move through the city rather than with it, a permanent existential playground.” For Lucia Farrow and Maya Spangler, these contradictions type the backdrop of their newest picture sequence and exhibition, The Flesh That Says Yes.
The intimate sequence traces the expertise of rising up of their hometown, and the uneasy, suspended area between identities. “We investigate ourselves and the city as a state of becoming, romanticising the chaos of ruination for its refusal to provide whole answers. We are constantly at odds with feeling pure and abject, young and old, free and trapped,” they describe.
Moving by these contradictions, the images place their our bodies in a variety of positions: arched throughout lavatory flooring, naked ft prancing round a kindling firepit, slumped in opposition to the seabed as waves crash over them. These configurations are set in opposition to photographs of town. “Los Angeles was just as much a part of the exhibition as our bodies were,” they are saying. “It was our playground, a site of ritual where the images came about.”
Although they arrive from completely different practices – Farrow from a tremendous artwork background, Spangler from narrative and trend pictures – the undertaking converges round shared touchpoints of ruination, abjection and explorations of womanhood. Their first collaboration started in 2024, after they moved right into a Los Angeles condominium collectively. Though each have been a part of town’s inventive melting pot, they’d grown up on reverse sides of city and barely knew one another. “At the time, we both felt pretty raw, lost, and unsure, and we ended up needing each other in ways we didn’t expect,” they recall.
“The work comes from our shared space,” they clarify. “Sometimes we can go days without saying much, but we still feel each other’s presence, and it feels balancing. Other times it’s chaotic – full of noise, clothes everywhere, packages, artwork, too many cups in the sink. A lot of the work lives in small moments: being close to someone, watching yourself exist, noticing how your body reacts before you have words for it.”
Their condominium grew to become a stand-in for the sequence’ emotional core, embodied by a nest sculpture they constructed from sticks foraged alongside the LA River and in Griffith Park. “We spray-painted it, added personal items, jewellery, little trinkets, the way birds decorate their nests. It felt connected to becoming adults and building something for ourselves, but also to the lightness of being younger, building forts, playing, making spaces just to exist in – this childlike emotionality we feel,” they clarify.
The undertaking takes its title from a line in Paul Éluard’s poem Liberty, encountered in David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars. “When taken out of context, the poem fit so well into the film even though in reality it was about freedom, and written during the German occupation of France,” they clarify. “I think we were drawn to the idea of the body responding instinctively, almost devotionally, the same way that Cronenberg was.” This affect exhibits up within the framing of physique components throughout the photos, the place the artists’ our bodies are indistinguishable from each other. Their our bodies are not often shot in full, and their faces are sometimes obscured by hair or veiled by supplies.
This sense of devotion threads all through the sequence: within the submissive poses the themes inhabit, the baptismal wash of water over pores and skin, and a rosary strung from Adderall tablets. It’s a deliberate play on the pseudo-spirituality usually ascribed to LA, and one which’s more and more entangled with the web world. “We were interested in the way that these aesthetics mirrored a kind of paganism and site of ritual. The ceremonies of a girlhood spent online, and the internet girl as a kind of online shaman,” they clarify.
The collation of the pictures into an exhibition was an experimental course of for the artists. “This project wasn’t really about single images standing on their own, but about how the images sit together. There’s almost an impossibility to curate an exhibition of images now, and for them to feel alive, since each of us sees about 2000 images a day online,” they clarify. It’s this desensitisation that led the artists to color on the work, including to the already chaotic layering and collaging that mimics the vertigo of coming of age.