About a month ago I got a submission together for a gallery in Chicago. My parents were going there for a long weekend vacation and visiting a cousin. Turns out, this cousin’s uncle-in-law owns a very nice gallery, so she suggested my mother and I each have something to show because she would arrange a personal meeting. How could we say no, no matter how slim the chance of it getting anywhere?
I decided to focus on my self-portraits in abandoned places and created a set of 13 of my best, wrote a topic-specific artist statement, and updated my resume. I put hi-res and lo-res previews onto a CD and hoped that the owner might take a look rather than passing it straight to the curator’s assistant. I figured it was a good exercise regardless in giving myself some directed thinking and that I could tailor this submission to other galleries.
So just today I happened to start talking about it with Pete for some reason, and said that soon enough I would be certain nothing would come from the Chicago gallery, and that I needed to get things ready to submit locally. I told him that one of my goals for 2010 is to have a show in a “real” gallery (not a store, not a coffee shop, as much as I appreciate and love the honor of being in those places).
Then I checked the mail an hour later. There was a telltale thin envelope from said gallery in Chicago. The most fancy rejection letter I’ve yet to receive…even the envelope was heavy stock!
And there it is. Time to figure out my next move.
