Though not as disturbing, Smith\u2019s other art books explore absence, too. House of Giller is his depiction of inside the home of his longtime friend and fellow East Dallas artist Susan Giller, who since passed away, during the times when he would house sit for her. <\/p>\n
\u201cBasically, it was never intentional to document her house, but what the heck are you going to do?\u201d Smith says, mentioning that her neurotic cat hated everyone but Giller. \u201cWhen she died (in 2024), I realized that I had all these drawings of her place, and then after we had the estate sale, and I was back at her little bungalow, it was like she just disappeared. Even when her house still had the things in it, because she wasn\u2019t there, they were losing their sparkle.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nine Days With LiHua is made up of works he created from inside his friends\u2019 New York apartment while he was looking after their cat, LiHua. <\/p>\n
Despite invoking them both by name in the titles, Smith doesn\u2019t draw Giller nor LiHua. Giller\u2019s face is included via a self-portrait she made of herself, and LiHua\u2019s face, obscured by a curtain, is shown in a photo. In LiHua\u2019s case, the point is to show her home, which is everything to a cat, and make the viewer see the world through her eyes.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe cat is present in her absence,\u201d Smith says. \u201cThis is where she sleeps in front of the radiator. This is where she scratches her little paws. So she\u2019s present, but like a ghost, I never saw her. I\u2019ve cat sat for her four times, and she\u2019s like a ghost. You only hear her as a bump in the night or as something out of the corner of your eye as she darts from one room to the other.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Though not as disturbing, Smith\u2019s other art books explore absence, too. House of Giller is his depiction of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":478328,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[11426,102,104,103,161523,161524,161525,161526,161527,70374,161528,6617],"class_list":["post-478327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas","tag-brad-ford-smith","tag-dallas","tag-dallas-headlines","tag-dallas-news","tag-house-of-giller","tag-k-co-press","tag-nine-days-with-lihua","tag-nomadic-fungi-institute","tag-susan-giller","tag-wfaa-tv","tag-where-to-find-a-ghost","tag-white-rock-lake"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=478327"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478327\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/478328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=478327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=478327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=478327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}