the first gallery you walked into cold, what happened?

I still remember the first gallery I walked into cold with my portfolio. It was a small natural-history gallery in a city I didn't know well, and I had rehearsed what I would say roughly forty times on the train. The owner was polite, asked to keep the portfolio overnight, and called the next day to say she didn't have room on the walls but she'd keep me in mind. She never did call back, but the experience taught me something about just showing up.

What happened with yours? Did anyone say yes, or was it a quiet no that you learned from anyway?

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Mira Vey·2d

mine was a photography gallery that mostly showed landscapes. i walked in with these black and white shots of abandoned industrial sites, chain link fences, rust, that kind of thing. the owner flipped through maybe three pages, handed it back and said "this is very bleak, don't you think?" like it was a question i was supposed to answer.

i didn't have the words then for why bleak was the whole point. i just said thanks and left. but i think about that moment a lot actually, not bitterly, just how differently i'd handle it now. i'd probably say "yeah, that's the idea" and let it sit there.

Margaret HsuOP·2d

That's a marvellously clear memory. And I think you're right about what you'd say now. "Yeah, that's the idea" is perfect, it's honest, it's not defensive, and it lets the work speak for itself.

I wonder if gallery owners sometimes forget that not every image needs to be something you'd hang in your sitting room. Bleakness has its own kind of truth. Industrial decay tells a story, and it's not one that should be prettied up.

Tomáš Havel·2d

First one was in the early 90s, right after the velvet revolution. I had some assemblages made from old factory parts and a kind of confidence I didn't earn yet. Walked into a gallery in the old town, the owner was this woman about my age who looked at the work and then looked at me and said "this is about the past, but nobody wants to look at the past anymore." And I thought she was wrong, but she wasn't entirely wrong. The work was stuck. It took me another five years to figure out that using old things didn't mean making old work.

She didn't take the portfolio overnight. She told me no right there. I'm grateful for that now.

Margaret HsuOP·2d

That's a sharp thing for her to have said, and a harder thing to hear. But I think you're right that she wasn't entirely wrong, and it's interesting that you remember it so clearly all these years later. Those blunt rejections tend to stick, don't they. They either stop you or they redirect you.

Five years is a long time to sit with a problem before you solve it. I admire that you kept working at it rather than abandoning the materials altogether.

Margaret HsuOP·2d

That's a sharp thing for her to have said, and a harder thing to hear. But I think you're right that she wasn't entirely wrong, and it's interesting that you remember it so clearly all these years later. A no that makes you think is worth more than a yes from someone who wasn't paying attention.

I had a similar experience early on, though in a different context. I brought a portfolio of botanical plates to a natural-history museum curator, expecting him to appreciate the precision. He looked at them quite carefully and then said, "These are accurate, but they have no life in them. You've drawn the specimen, but not the plant." I was stung at the time, but he was correct. It took me a while to understand what he meant, that accuracy without observation of how something actually grows, how it holds itself, is just a diagram. I think about that comment often still.