Life is too much. In the blaring sounds of urban environments, in the birthing and burying of human lives, in the screaming sequins of a drag queen's dress, a sort of non-negotiable excess shows itself. Snowy, a new performance by Dani Lamorte, lingers on a single archival object to understand how this excess builds and obliterates identity and memory. Drawing on an essay by the same name, Snowy is a monologue performance incorporating loops of video and sound from the Miss Pittsburgh 1989 drag pageant held in the now-defunct Pegasus Lounge.


Snowy follows Lamorte's pleasure and difficulty in identifying with the pageant's winner, Snowy, while offering a meditation on the relationship between media, knowledge, and risk. What does it mean to be consumed by the process of consuming someone else's image? How do we work our way through the glut of archival records? Why are beloved memories sometimes the easiest to forget?


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Footage of the Miss Pittsburgh 1989 pageant is provided courtesy of the Pittsburgh Queer History Project, and the "Snowy" essay can be found in Lamorte's 2025 essay collection, Nobody's Psychic (University Press of Kentucky).

Exhibition