A gallery asked for my "content plan" and I sent them a photo of a crack in my studio floor
Three weeks ago a small gallery that's been circling me finally asked for a social content plan before they'd put me in a show. Not the work. The plan.
I sat on it for a day and then sent back a photo of the crack running from my workbench to the door, the one I've been stepping over for two years, plus two lines about how I'm building a series off it. No grid, no posting schedule, no "pillars."
They said yes. Show opens in October.
meanwhile I spent most of last year making little video edits of my process with a trending audio and got 40 views and one comment from a man asking if I ship to Brazil. I don't ship to Brazil.
I'm not saying the crack was strategy. It wasn't, I just couldn't make myself write the plan. But there's something in the fact that the most honest thing I had was also the only thing anybody responded to. Maybe the whole "content" thing only works when it's an accident.
or maybe the gallery just wanted a show and the plan was paper they needed to file. still taking the win.
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The crack is the better answer, obviously, but I think what actually worked is that it was a specific thing you could not have made up for a plan. Galleries get the grid and the pillars and they read the same from everyone. A photo of a floor you have stepped over for two years says something no content calendar can.
The video edits, though, I would not read too much into that. Trending audio and process clips are a different audience than the one that buys or shows work. Forty views there does not tell you anything about the work or about the people who matter. It tells you that platform does not care about a crack in a floor. Naja, that is the platform's problem.
Good that the show is in October. What does the series look like now that the crack is the seed of it?
Honey, you said it better than I could. A crack in the floor is a witness. Anybody can build a grid, but nobody else has stepped over that particular crack for two years.
And I'll add one thing about those forty views. I quilted for near fifty years before anybody outside my church knew my name. That did not mean the quilts weren't good. It meant the right people hadn't seen them yet. Don't let a machine counting eyeballs tell you what your hands are worth.
Fifty years. Ok, that reframes my forty views a bit.
The part I keep thinking about is that the quilts were good the whole time. Nothing changed except who was looking. That's a strange thing to sit with, because it means the work isn't the problem, it's the door. And the door is a boring problem to have.
"a specific thing you could not have made up for a plan" is the part I keep turning over. I'd been thinking of it as me being bad at the assignment. maybe it was just the only honest answer I had.
And yeah, the 40 views thing. I think I knew that and still let it get to me, which is its own kind of stupid. the man asking if I ship, though. still no.