I survived my first solo gallery opening this past Friday night!
It was touch & go there for a while... I felt quite insane all last week. Not at all like an inspired artist getting ready to tell the world what's on her mind.
I even went as far as to shoot two new images the morning of the opening! (I already had 2 portraits of Venetian masks and I wanted to fill up a tall, slim blank wall... so I shot 2 more of the masks I had at home...)
I was nervous because this was all my work. No one else to fall back on. If people didn't like it, there wasn't anything else in the gallery for them to look at. Plus, 3 people from the Light Factory (one of 4 museums in the country that is devoted solely to the promotion of photography and filmmaking as art) came to the opening... The director even bought one of my prints.
Not too shabby.
The nice thing is now I'm really ready to start shooting new projects. I think the exercise of doing the show without a backup helped me focus. I know more things I want to say with my images...
So the day after the show, I went to my friend Austin's annual Shrimp Boil. I got to see my cousin and her (painter) artist husband who was just back from visiting his father abroad. I told him about my almost meltdown and he just laughed... He told me "I've seen worse situations." He used to own a gallery himself and told me about the artist who had an opening one Friday night and as of that afternoon had not hung a single piece of work. The artist told him that she was not going to have anything to hang, but he talked to her and by that evening, she had the show hung. That did make me feel better.
Note to self: Procrastination bad... Preparation good. And don't listen to the naysayer voice in your own head who keeps trying to talk you out of taking the leap of faith.
Did any of that make sense?
