brad ford smith : where to find a ghost and other stories
October 18, 2025 - November 22, 2025
Press Release
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(Dallas) Ro2 Art is proud to present Where to Find a Ghost and Other True Stories, a triptych of projects by Dallas-based artist Brad Ford Smith. The umbrella exhibition encompasses three interconnected chapters — Where to Find a Ghost, Nine Days with LiHua, and House of Giller — each of which debuts its own limited-edition book from K.Co Press. A public book launch is scheduled for Saturday, October 25, 2025, 2–4 PM at the gallery.
This exhibition stands as both culmination and continuation: a tribute to Smith’s decades-long exploration of place, memory, and the peculiar poetry of documentation, and a recognition of his profound influence on contemporary art’s engagement with narrative, locality, and the archive as artistic medium. In Where to Find a Ghost and Other True Stories, Brad Ford Smith presents an exhibition structured as a triptych of investigations, each series its own ecosystem of meaning, yet all three speaking to one another across the gallery space. His process is as meticulous as it is imaginative: each piece rendered with the precision of technical documentation, yet animated by an artist’s understanding of how meaning accrues through accumulation, repetition, and the careful choreography of visual information. The result is an exhibition that breathes with quiet intensity, simultaneously anchored in the particularities of place and unmoored from any single truth. Where to Find a Ghost and Other True Stories continues Smith’s decades-long engagement with the spaces between fact and fiction, presence and absence, the documented and the imagined. Through his unique practice, he asks us to consider what makes a story “true”—and whether the most authentic narratives might be those we construct rather than those we simply record. Where to Find a Ghost documents sites throughout Dallas where tragic deaths have occurred—locations that remain unmarked, their histories unremembered. Through meticulous ink drawings, Smith maps these forgotten coordinates, each work carrying on its reverse the story of what happened there. The project operates as both memorial and investigation, asking what it means to witness places that bear no visible trace of their past, and whether attention itself might constitute a form of remembrance. Nine Days with LiHua chronicles a fall 2022 visit to LiHua’s Brooklyn apartment—a quiet study of a life lived with deliberate simplicity. Made over coffee and late nights, these ink and watercolor drawings on postcard-sized paper attend to the furniture, books, cast iron radiator, and small rituals that shape a modest existence. The work balances intimate observation with a larger meditation on what it means to pursue tranquility in an anxious world. The book Nine Days with LiHua (K.Co Press) extends the series in narrative form, interweaving drawings with reflections on restraint, routine, and the possibility of contentment. House of Giller was drawn over years while caring for Susan Giller’s Dallas home and her legendarily opinionated cat Nancy. An affectionate study of objects, wear, and the theater of everyday interiors—from the front door with its broken electric kiln to the peculiar logic of a household shaped by its inhabitants—the series elevates the domestic to the mythic. The companion publication from K.Co Press collects stories and drawings that transform the quotidian into something approaching legend. |
About the Artist
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Brad Ford Smith is a visual artist and art conservator living in Dallas, Texas. Brad’s parents were accomplished freelance artists who in the late 50’s created an art studio in their home. Fueled by a seemingly endless supply of scrap paper, pencils, paint, X-Acto knives and Elmer’s glue Brad discovered an early love for experimentation. After earning his degree from The Kansas City Art Institute in painting and printmaking, Brad eventually found himself back to Dallas at his childhood home experimenting with drawing, painting, printmaking, and sculpture while also earning a living as a professional art conservator of historic objects.
What distinguishes Smith’s practice is his understanding that documentation and invention need not be opposing forces—that the line between them is less a boundary to be respected than a territory to be explored. Whether mapping Dallas’s forgotten tragedies, chronicling domestic interiors in Brooklyn, or documenting the accumulated life of a friend’s house and cat, Smith approaches each project with the precision of a researcher and the license of a storyteller, creating works that are simultaneously meticulous and strange, authoritative and impossible to verify. Coinciding with all his creative endeavors is Brad’s long standing practice of automatic drawing. Rendered in ink and colored pencils these painterly drawings are a diary of sorts reflecting his state of mind and obsessions. These small works are free flowing and abstract. While they don’t begin with any particular focus, by the end they have happily morphed into oddly exquisite forms that embody otherworldly structures. |
exhibition statement
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"This project began with the feeling that some stories won’t sit still. In Dallas, I chased rumors to archives and sidewalks, looking for the places where public memory thins—where a headline once was and a “ghost” remains. Drawing is my way of holding those fragments long enough to see what they’re made of. At the same time, I’ve been making drawings of private interiors: friends’ homes, borrowed rooms, a cat keeping watch. In those rooms, the smallest details—how books teeter on a shelf, where the light falls—carry a different kind of history. Together, the three chapters move between the city and the living room, between what we inherit and what we keep. The work asks whether an honest record can be both researched and felt—and whether the things that haunt us might also be the things that keep us human."
- Brad Ford Smith, 2025 |
