Le Tigre’s JD Samson launched her new calendar, JD’s Lesbian Utopia, with a life-size, rainbow-colored RV, an evocation of the vehicle JD took across America for the production of the work. Video and audio filled the gallery, along with photographs and other collaborative works by Cass Bird, Lex Vaughn, Dusty Lombardo, and Sasha Anthome.
The previous summer, JD had collaborated with photographer Cass Bird on a follow-up to their celebrated 2003 project, JD’s Lesbian Calendar. The 2006 calendar focused on community and self-segregated spaces. The project was photographed over ten days while traveling with five lesbian friends in a rented RV, visiting gay and lesbian campgrounds and RV parks in the southern United States in search of a “lesbian utopia.” As they traveled across countrysides and mountains in this thirty-foot vehicle with a kitchenette, they feverishly documented every moment: from tubing on the lazy rivers of Georgia women’s land to frolicking in the above-ground pool oasis of a Texas gay men’s ranch. JD and friends took over two thousand photos and twenty-six hours of videotape of both the members and visitors of these intentional communities and themselves, who, by traveling together so closely, were creating their own lesbian utopia.
Many people in the lesbian and gay community were looking for a utopian space. The trick, as JD found, was you have to make it yourself.
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