In the performance piece Snowy, Dani Lamorte lingers on a single piece of footage to examine how desire, memory, and image blur into one another. The performance, an extension of an essay of the same name, centers on a VHS recording of the 1989 Miss Pittsburgh drag pageant, held at the now-defunct Pegasus Lounge. Within it, a performer named Snowy lip-syncs to “Addicted to Love,” bathed in stage lights that dissolve into the grain of videotape. For Lamorte, that moment becomes a meditation on what it means to love an image, to confuse attachment with understanding, and to acknowledge how wrong identification can be.
Watching Snowy, I kept thinking about ghosts, how an image can outlive the person it depicts, how looking becomes its own act of haunting. Lamorte doesn’t attempt to resurrect Snowy so much as trace her absence, chasing what remains once the person is gone and only her gestures linger. It reminded me of how I look at photographs of my parents, both now gone. In each image they are suspended in an instant that refuses to change. I know these pictures cannot speak, but I return to them anyway, as if proximity might rewrite what time has already taken.
Lamorte first encountered Snowy around 2016, when fellow performer Larritta Not So Young donated a set of VHS tapes to the Pittsburgh Queer History Project, founded by Lamorte’s partner, Harrison Apple. Watching and digitizing the tapes in their apartment, they were struck by Snowy’s number. “I’m not sure I could state clearly and definitively what it is about Snowy’s performance that draws me in,” Lamorte recalls. “That’s part of what I try to explore, the inexhaustibility of affinity, something [writer] Brian Dillon describes as ambiguous, personal, and often considered unserious or insignificant.” Before this archival encounter, Lamorte had performed drag throughout Pittsburgh at Pegasus, P-Town, Blue Moon, and even in the streets. In those circles, pageant tapes circulated like pedagogical tools, shown to younger queens as guides to performance and persona. “It wasn’t research to me, but part of my already ongoing social world,” Lamorte says. Only later, after trying to learn more about Snowy, did Lamorte discover that she had died a week before they reached out to one of her friends.
That moment reshaped the work’s meaning. There is a quiet devastation in realizing that someone you have come to know through image and gesture is no longer reachable. Snowy dwells in that space of belated recognition, the gap between knowing and losing, between seeing and understanding too late. It is a performance that recognizes the futility of trying to hold what is already gone, and still keeps looking. “I identify less with Snowy than I do with the effect of her performance,” Lamorte explains. “I want—and I think everyone wants—to possess her charm, the power of her gestures, and the audience’s emotional investment in her. I’m covetous of what I believe she had, what I imagine she had, which I know is very different from the reality of her and her life. The beauty, the joy, of identification is how wrong it always is.”
Lamorte is clear that they never knew Snowy personally. “What I love is an image that’s disconnected and floating in a VHS collection,” they say. “It has something to do with her, but I probably don’t have a great grasp on the relationship between the person and the image.” That separation between the living person and their lingering image is what gives Snowy its spectral quality. The work unfolds like a séance conducted through flickering light, where the medium itself becomes both message and haunting.
I recognize that kind of longing: the desire to hold on to an image precisely because it cannot be touched. When I look at those photographs of my parents, I’m struck less by what they reveal than by what they conceal. They are preserved, impossibly intact, outside of time, young and whole in a way that life never allows. It’s a preservation that hurts. Snowy captures that same ache, the feeling of witnessing someone’s vitality from the other side of disappearance.
The essay and performance both trace that instability through language and sound. Lamorte cites Karen Finley and Diamanda Galas as key influences, artists whose work moves between lucidity and incoherence until both sharpen. “I am always trying to notice where my attention is falling apart,” they say, “where my mind is becoming clouded with associations, half-present memories, and bad rhymes. Then I head towards those clouds.” In Snowy, clarity and fragmentation alternate rhythmically, suggesting that the act of remembering is itself a form of disorientation. Tone, Lamorte explained, emerges from distance.
“I never knew her and I know very little about her,” they say. “Those images feel impossibly close despite how far the person of Snowy is from me.”
The result is a delicate oscillation between reverence and remove, an acknowledgment that love for an image is always mediated. Lamorte resists the idea that Snowy functions as archival restoration or nostalgic recovery. “Pittsburgh is a capital of nostalgia,” they say. “People will see this work as archival practice or a celebration of history, neither of which I intend. Making Snowy in Pittsburgh in 2025 means restating my interest in internal processes, not external changes.” The work does not attempt to map the city’s shifting queer geography so much as to trace an interior state: obsession as method.
When asked whether Snowy represents a lineage of lost performers, Lamorte complicates the premise. “Most of us will be lost to time, even while we’re still alive,” they say. “People talk about wanting to meet queer elders, but queer elders are already everywhere: in our bars, our choirs, our churches, our clinics. The trouble is that people want to meet idealized elders, personalized versions of Marsha P. Johnson or Sylvia Rivera, without any of the human messiness.” For Lamorte, lineage and loss are contingent on where one looks. “Lineages are like taxonomies,” they note, “artifacts of the questions we ask, not maps to what is.”
That insistence that there is no fixed lineage, only the act of searching, feels like the emotional core of Snowy. It’s not a portrait of a person so much as a portrait of pursuit: the slow and sometimes delusional process of loving what refuses to stay. “Remembering is a kind of fantasizing—a solitary act turning someone else, living or dead, into a kind of internal possession,” Lamorte says. This becomes Snowy’s ethical center, the recognition that remembrance and possession are bound together, that love for an image is always shadowed by the urge to own it.
For Lamorte, performance itself is neither archive nor trace. “Performance is the use of time and inner states as media,” they say. “I’m trying to do something inside myself, mentally, emotionally, physically, which is my sole focus, my singular use of time. I’m not sure that any of this survives the live moment.”
Perhaps that is what feels most honest about Snowy. It doesn’t pretend that ghosts can be kept. To sit with something fleeting is to accept loss as part of the encounter. Lamorte’s performance, like the photographs of my parents I keep returning to, acknowledges that some images are meant only to shimmer briefly before fading. They remind us that wholeness belongs to the past, that to love someone or something is often to love what is already gone. If Snowy could see the performance, Lamorte imagines her response would be understated. “She’d be appreciative but detached,” they say. “It was so long ago and nightclub fame doesn’t last. She had a whole life after that pageant, and I wasn’t even there that night. She’d probably want to tell me about something else, and I’d have to learn to be interested in whatever that something else is.”
In Snowy, Lamorte does not seek closure or revelation, but a reckoning with misrecognition. What endures is not Snowy herself, but the unstable relationship between artist and image, and the recognition that love, when directed toward an apparition, is always at risk of becoming its own kind of disappearance.
Still, there is solace in the chase. To look again, knowing the image will not look back, is its own act of care. Lamorte’s gaze toward Snowy feels like my own toward the photographs of my parents. We are both drawn to ghosts, to the fragments that remain after the living have gone quiet. When I return to those photos, I realize it isn’t them haunting me, but me haunting them. Like Lamorte watching Snowy’s performance, I press against the surface of an image, asking it to yield more than it can. The stillness of my parents’ faces mirrors the stillness of the VHS frame—proof that they existed, and that I keep returning to what cannot change. Perhaps this is the real haunting. Not the ghosts that linger in the images, but the living who refuse to let them rest. We keep visiting what has already vanished, hoping to find movement where there is none, believing that attention alone might keep them near.
Tara Fay Coleman is an artist, curator, and cultural worker from Buffalo, NY. Rooted in lived experience, her work challenges institutions while creating space for marginalized stories. She lives and works between Pittsburgh, PA, and New Haven, CT.
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