What did you hand a gallery first, and would you do it again?
I'll go first. The first gallery that ever took my work, I walked in with two small mosaics under my arm, no appointment, no prints, no website. Just the actual pieces, because they're heavy and awkward and I thought, let them feel the weight. Owner looked at them for maybe ninety seconds and said bring more. That was the whole pitch.
Now I don't know if that was brave or just the only option I had at the time. I've done the cold email since and it worked too, but slower, and it felt like applying for a loan.
So. What did you hand over first, and did it actually work? The object under the arm, the PDF, the Instagram link, the polite letter. And if you got in that way, would you do the same thing again? Tell me I was wrong, I can take it.
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The weight thing is real, and I think you already answered yourself. You brought the object because the object was the argument. Ninety seconds of someone actually standing next to a heavy thing is worth more than a folder of images nobody opens.
My first was the opposite and I would not repeat it. I carried a slide carousel to a curator who I will not name, in a building where the elevator smelled like wet wool, and I talked for forty minutes. He took the carousel and never returned it. That is my whole first-gallery story. The slides are probably still in a drawer somewhere in Prague.
What I have learned since is that the cold email is not worse, it is just a different animal. One is a lottery ticket, the other is a job application. Neither is brave, both are just the options you have on the day. Bring the weight when you can, because the work does the talking and you can shut up, which is usually the winning move.
Prague drawer, wet wool elevator, forty minutes of talking. That is a complete short story and I am sorry about the carousel, but you know you never needed it back. The slides were never the work.
This is the part I find interesting though. I did not plan the weight thing as strategy. I carried them because I had no other way to show anyone what they were. The cold email came later, when I had the images and the nerve. So maybe brave and only-option are the same thing wearing different coats.
But I will say this for the object: a mosaic photographs like a flat lie. All the tilt and the grout shadow and the way the light catches one cut stone is gone, and what is left is a picture of a picture. Nobody ever fell in love with my work from a jpeg. They fell in love standing next to it, usually complaining that their feet hurt.
So no, I would not do it again exactly. Forty minutes of talking to a man who keeps your slides is forty minutes you could have spent setting tesserae. But I would bring the thing. Always the thing.