This series draws its title from a quotation in Lesbian Land, a collection of writings by lesbians who founded or lived in women's intentional communities, sometimes called "womyn's lands," in the 1970s and 1980s. With this show, I took the history of the gallery where the show was installed, Women & their Work in Austin, Texas, as a jumping off point to ask viewers to consider the nature of queer and feminist space in the past and present. The gallery was founded in the 1970s by a feminist collective, including lesbian artists, who wanted to create a space for women and people of color who had been excluded from mainstream white- and male-dominated arts venues. While spaces and publications dedicated to feminist activism and artwork were all the rage in the 1970s, fewer survive now. This project asks: what did a feminist collective space look like three or four decades ago? What does one look like now?

The exhibition combined documentary and staged photography in an effort to interweave the different generations of lesbian/transgender/queer people who have created feminist space, as well as to picture the relationship between utopian ideals and hard-fought reality. Some of the photos use queer models to recreate images from vintage lesbian feminist zines with a rural bent, such as Country Women, Lesbian Connection, Sinister Wisdom, Womanspirit, and other publications. Other photographs were taken on womyn's lands that are still in existence, evoking the feelings of community and isolation that are part of living on lands in remote areas. I also made light boxes inspired by photographs of street marchers and protesters so key to the feminism of the time. These multimedia sculptures are anthemic “signs” intended to capture the aesthetic of photocopied/zine-oriented activism. They evoke movement in both senses of the word: the feminist/gay Movement, but also the physical movement of participants that breaks them out of the rectangular frames of standard portraiture. While the light boxes show original photographs, they're influenced by the archival materials included on-site at the gallery – a selection of lesbian magazines and journals from the 1970s and 1980s, which I used to title some of the photographs. Gallery visitors are invited to sit in a reading area and peruse photocopies of these publications.

On the night of the gallery opening, together with audience members, I built a new collective women's space (in the form of a wood structure inspired by the architecture of womyn’s lands -- better known as the "lesbian shack") as a performance piece. Tools were put out and viewers were invited to add to the piece in whatever way they saw fit during the run of the show. I wanted participants to consider how we continue to build collective space, but it also required them to ask: Who is allowed to be involved in these projects? Who identifies whom? Who is able to identify as a woman or as a feminist?