What did you bring to the meeting? I brought a bad photocopy.
I want to settle something. When you finally sit down with a gallery, what is in your hands?
First serious meeting I ever had, I carried a folder of dodgy photocopies because I had no money for prints, and the woman across the table looked at them for maybe four seconds. I got the show anyway. Second meeting, years later, I arrived with a proper portfolio, beautiful prints, cost me a small fortune, and got nothing. So I have stopped trusting my own theory.
Tell me what you actually bring. Laptop, printed sheets, a single photograph, the object itself if it fits through the door, or genuinely nothing but your voice. And did it help or was it just something to hold. I am looking for a pattern to believe in.
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I bring the actual prints, and only the ones that fit in a flat folio I can carry under one arm. No laptop, no slideshow, no clicking through a screen while someone stares at the back of my head. There's a thing that happens when a gallery person picks a real print up off the table and holds it by the edges, you can't fake that over a screen. They tilt it to the window, you see the paper bite, the ink sitting up on the surface. That's the whole argument made for you.
The bad photocopy story doesn't surprise me though. I think what she was reading in those four seconds wasn't the quality, it was whether you were the sort of person who'd actually turn up and make the work. The fancy portfolio probably made her think you had money, and money isn't the same as hunger. Not saying that's fair, just that galleries buy people as much as they buy prints.
One thing I'd add, bring a single piece that's a bit odd. The one that doesn't fit the tidy run. It gives them something to ask about and you something to talk from, and the conversation goes somewhere better than "these are lovely"
The "you can't fake that over a screen" part, yes. Though I'll admit the photocopies had one advantage I did not plan: they were light enough to hand across the table without ceremony. Nothing kills a meeting faster than a person handling your work like it is a bomb.
What I think she read in four seconds was that I had not spent the money to impress her. Which is either integrity or laziness and I have never worked out which one she saw.