A story by Leo Gonzales

Image: Untitled by Leo Gonzales

I. Upon a gallery opening, the gallery owner creates an exhibition showcasing an artist. Sales are based upon commission and on weekends the exhibit is a classroom run by the artists. Supplemental income from art sales makes a comfortable collaborative workspace that offers a lucrative four-day work week. The workers come in and out and work on square tablets for drawing. On off days it rains and they assist each other in ways that require communication via email and phone call, in-person meetings about where to go with an idea or how to stop the amount of income that is being spent that makes it to where you can’t work anymore because you’re not making money. And when it rains over most projects, it’s difficult to decide whether to make stress management part of the job or part of something that they’re doing, so they continue to manage stress in a separate room that requires they do something else.

II. Each artist selects the best student from each class to continue working in the gallery, to support themselves in their ability and the overall mission. There is only so much space available and with the promise of small teams and limited gallery space on the wall per year, the owner contemplates the beauty of opening another gallery, and another gallery and another. The owner briefly worries about the rarity of a beautiful artist and moves on. It starts raining while the room where guest painters and sculptors get to not only create new works but create in a style that requires them to calm negative ideas as much as primitively beat medium after medium down, they start to feel the concept of having been where someone else was with the same supplies and understanding that the position of boss and owner can just as much be a revolving door. And a person walks in more than halfway after the other person is finished beating down a substance, and the person whom walked in continued to beat their medium down to a smaller substance and smaller substance and smaller substance until finally they could piece it back together and then break it apart again in a different way.

III. Mandatory promotion is offered once a year. A high-selling artist is let go because they’re too good at what they do, and the artist who is too good at what they do is upset. The gallery owner says that there is too much attention on their gallery to the point where it is disturbing the other artists, and the high-selling artist tries to negotiate their position. The gallery owner says it’s not so much about unwanted attention as much as never having helped anyone. The gallery owner knows exactly what they have to do, they just don’t know how to say it, and they convey it in an artistic hand-like mannerism that is essentially telling the high-selling artist why they can’t work in the gallery anymore. The artist disagrees before they say anything by saying good ideas spread fast and that they’ve helped plenty of people every single day and the gallery owner says that you’re supposed to keep your ideas in-house.

IV. The collaborative workspace is calmer when the person who is too good at what they do leaves, and a potential protégé of the high-selling artist, a protégé of another resident, can’t help but think of what it would’ve been like had they worked together the following year that never happened the way it was supposed to. The protégé tells everyone that they actually like thinking of the stained glass below the rooftop that lets light in. Now in the room where artists are beating their mediums down to their smallest form, it starts to rain. The established relationship is good enough, however, the protégé considers how much money they could make if they just go it alone, how nice it feels to just go it alone.

V. On gallery day, the high-selling artist returns and purchases one work from each artist in good faith. The high-selling artist speaks to the protégé who is currently interested in him and describes a work of art that was once sold in the exhibit, how it instantly made him think that some things just never happen whether you want them to or not.

This work was featured in issue #11