Exhibition Description:
Searching for a Feeling traces the unstable terrain of memory and how it stretches, fractures, and reshapes itself over time. Pulled from archival family photographs, the works in this exhibition explore the sensation of remembering something that has never been fully known, and how trauma alters memory’s contours in ways both subtle and profound. Rather than seeking accuracy, the exhibition rests in the emotional residue of recollection, where clarity and erasure coexist and where one can feel everything and nothing at once.
In the main space, large-scale pigment transfers on sheer polyester fabric immerse the viewer in memory’s shifting atmosphere. The repeated images, layered across tall veils of translucent cloth, drift in and out of focus as the viewer moves through the space. Each sheet hangs slightly apart, allowing light to slip between them and distort the image further. These works echo the experience of returning to a memory again and again, only to find it altered, softened in some places, sharpened in others, always changing shape.
In the adjoining hallway, a smaller and more intimate body of work unfolds through Polaroid emulsion lifts on glass. Here, archival images are transformed by the fluid unpredictability of the emulsion, folding and rippling as if memory itself were trying to settle into a form. Each piece hovers one inch from the wall, casting a faint shadow that becomes a second, ghost-like image. These works hold the fragile details, the fragments that resurface without warning, the pieces of a story that remain suspended just out of reach. Placed in separate rooms yet in quiet conversation, the two bodies of work reflect the dual nature of remembering. The fabric pieces stretch memory across space, inviting viewers to walk through uncertainty and distortion. The glass works compress memory into delicate, floating impressions, revealing how easily it can tear, wrinkle, or shift under pressure. Together, they consider how memory is shaped not only by time but by the body—by trauma, by intuition, by the longing to understand what was never fully seen.
In Searching for a Feeling, memory is not an archive but a living material, altered by every return. Ngo invites viewers into the in-between: the place where remembering becomes an act of creation, and where the search for clarity becomes its own intimate form of truth.
Artist Bio:
Bao Nghi Ngo is a self-taught, first-generation Asian American artist based in Dallas, Texas. Working primarily with alternative photographic processes, Ngo explores the fragile terrain of memory, identity, and healing. Her practice often merges cyanotype, weaving, and mixed-media experimentation to investigate how images can fracture, fade, and reassemble over time. Ngo holds a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from the University of North Texas, where she graduated Magna Cum Laude as a Distinguished Honors College Scholar. Her undergraduate thesis, Lost in Time: An Arts-Based Autoethnographic Inquiry into Traumatic Brain Injuries, stemmed from her own experience with a brain injury—a formative event that continues to inform her art. Through slow, tactile processes, she transforms the act of remembering into a study of resilience and care.
Her work has been exhibited across Texas, including in ART214 Biennial Juried Exhibition through the City of Dallas Office of Arts and Culture, The 9th Annual Texas Juried Exhibition at Artspace111, Colorplay at the Dallas Center for Photography, Apophenia at ICOSA Collective, and Ginger Roots at 400h Gallery.
Ngo is currently an Artist in Residence at The Cedars Union (Cohort V) and is participating in the 2nd Annual Cedars Union Printmaking Micro-Residency in 2025, followed by the AiR: Underground residency at Arts Mission Oak Cliff in 2026.
Through her practice, Ngo turns vulnerability into language, creating spaces where art and science, body and memory, coexist in quiet dialogue.