Excerpted footage of the revelry floats through a vivid and constantly changing landscape alongside hand tracings the artist made of his late mother’s sketches.
Patricia Satterwhite struggled with mental illness and turned to drawing as a form of therapy, producing thousands of illustrations relating to a wide range of topics, from medicine to astrology to consumer culture. The younger Satterwhite incorporates this imagery across his work, paying homage to the person whose encouragement and example inspired him to pursue art.
The title refers to ballroom, a subculture that rose to prominence within LGBTQIA+ circles in the 1980s; ballroom fuses fashion, music, performance, and activism toward personal expression and community building.
In the video, Satterwhite performs vogue, a highly stylized form of dance that is a signature of ballroom, and creates animated avatars by filming himself one hundred times in front of a green screen before duplicating his likeness, altering his hair, and obscuring his skin with colorful patterns.
Casting himself as a chameleon, Satterwhite embraces the ballroom ethos that identity is fluid, performative, and open to interpretation.
