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“The ranch performs a hyper-camp recreation of post-war American ideals, with tongue-in- cheek odes to domesticity, family, and a little glamorized psychosis. Videos and photographs featuring the ranch invariably include motifs such a classic cars, old Hollywood showgirl glamour, painted lips and Little Edie slurs. Bailey revels in the distortion of archetypal Americana imagery, serving up dead birds on cake stands like a surreal red stocking-clad housewife, and putting horse rains in the hands of Tom of Finland-esque boys in painted cowboy boots and jewels. Day to day life itself is focused on gardening, working the land and the house, cooking and bringing people together around meals and sunset. The bare bones of the house and the earth around it become canvases for the creation of fantasy: entire rooms are painted in the deep, Savage Ranch red, like wombs to bear the fruits of creativity; sails are strung up above the outdoor decking, turning part of the porch into a beautiful ship hybrid. The house and land morph day to day into varyingly surreal stages, a Beetlejuice-esque pantomime of simple domestic existence with all the tongue-in- cheek gaudiness of aJohn Waters film.

Perched on a hill in the middle of the arid souther californian desert, the lighthouse of queer artist Love Bailey’s Savage Ranch seems dropped from the sky like Dorothy’s house. The ranch - an queer artists’ colony and home run by Bailey - was our last stop, a grand and spectacular finale, and in many ways came to embody in itself alone many of the motifs and rituals of romantic americana reenactment which we had encountered during our journey.”