Every month or so gallery director Mia Nielsen packs up a work she's sold to a New York collector she has never met. In fact, Nielsen has never met most of her clients because the gallery she runs has no physical presence. Nielsen operates quiverprojects.com, a virtual gallery she launched in June 2001 out of her apartment in midtown Toronto. And three months ago, Paul Butler shut down the space that housed Winnipeg's othergallery, which he ran himself, and shifted all his efforts into a "web-based nomadic" gallery (othergallery.com). He had to, he says, because there was no commercial market in Winnipeg for the kind of art he wanted to show.

Nielsen and Butler are among the first online gallery operators in Canada to gain international attention--and sales--for emerging Canadian artists, something that's very difficult to do with a real-world gallery in such a very short period of time.

To make it work, Nielsen, 29, knew she had to find a way to bring collectors to her site and to assure potential buyers that Quiver Projects was no shady internet huckster, but was legitimately representing artists' work. Based on contacts she had made working at Odon Wagner Gallery in Toronto, Nielsen was able to strike a deal with Sothebys.com, allowing her to be listed as an associate of the site. Earlier this year, Sothebys.com merged with eBay, and suddenly the potential audience for Quiver Projects ballooned to the millions of people who search eBay every day.

Compared to a real-world gallery, Nielsen's costs are minimal. She doesn't pay for gallery space and she has no staff. The "vault," where she keeps about a hundred pieces of art made by the artists she represents online, is a small, alarm-guarded closet.

Without the overhead of a gallery, Nielsen says she is able to take more risks, trying out artists online she may not have been able to make space for in a gallery. Case in point: photographer Robert Christie, who shoots scenes of urban decay. "It would require a huge investment to put on a show of his, and I'd expect not to sell much," she says, noting that Christie's work doesn't seem to be "fashionable" among Canadian collectors.

Operating online gives Nielsen (and Christie) a much larger market in which to play. Seventy percent of her clients are American, and virtually all of them are private collectors. She says this is one of the most exciting aspects of what she's doing: getting international attention for Canadian artists. It also has economic benefits. Because Nielsen deals with clients outside of Canada, she can rely on buyers in various markets around the world.

Dealing with international collectors offers another welcome change. "U.S. and European collectors are different from Canadians," she says. "They buy through their gut. It doesn't matter who did it. The artist is secondary to the work. Canadians tend to look for a good investment. They know who they want before they know what they want."

This year, Nielsen has been selling on average four to six pieces a month, ranging from $400 to as much as $15,000 (for a single painting from the Harold Town estate). It's more than enough to pay herself a decent wage, she says. Apart from eBay's $5 listing fees, her business resembles any gallery's. She typically gets about thirty-five percent of the hammer price, the artist gets sixty percent, and eBay takes about five percent. In cases where the artist is represented by another gallery and the buyer is from Ontario, Nielsen gives the other gallery a cut. Sothebys.com, meanwhile, adds a fifteen-percent fee on to the purchase price, which the buyer must pay. The buyer also pays shipping and insurance costs.

Working online, you open yourself up to "any kind of online crime you've ever read about," admits Nielsen. But the worst that's happened to her is someone buys a piece at auction but doesn't follow through with payment. Naturally, Nielsen doesn't ship anything until payment has cleared.

In fact, only about ten percent of her sales are actually made online at auction. The majority come from people who see the work on eBay and contact her via e-mail to find out more about the artist. In other words, the eBay listings work as a form of marketing more than a significant source of revenue. But they are a great source of potential new clients. Nielsen says a New York collector who bought her first piece from Quiver Projects through an eBay auction six months ago has bought about a dozen works since then.

Another client, who bid up the price on a painting by Gillian Iles from a minimum price of $250 (U.S.) to $850 (U.S.), has bought another four paintings by the artist and commissioned two more. "The auction is just the beginning of the relationship with a client," says Nielsen. "The vast majority are very responsive and eager to look at new work." About half of her approximately 100 clients are new collectors, and she works with between twenty and thirty regularly. Among her top-selling artists are Natalie Waldburger, Gillian Iles (who's never shown outside of Ontario), the estate of Harold Town, and Kelly Mark.

Butler, who's an artist himself, has had a similar experience with his virtual gallery, though he is less interested in turning his site into a self-supporting business. Butler sees othergallery.com acting like an online agent, and a way of creating prepackaged shows for artist-run centres. "othergallery will be the middleman rather than the outlet," he says. Not long ago, Santa Monica dealer Richard Heller picked up four artists from the othergallery site: William Cordova, Simon Hughes, Kineko Ivic, and Paul P. For Paul P. and Simon Hughes, it was their first U.S. shows--a big step for the artists who are both under 30. It's that kind of connection that has Butler excited about the power of the Net. And he credits Nielsen's Quiver Projects with providing inspiration for his own decision to go online. "It gave me permission to start thinking this way."

Besides, Butler says he doesn't have the time or patience to put thirty years into a gallery. "I want to speed it up." And being online gives him the luxury of not being limited to a specific space."

Nielsen, however, misses having a space to display art and says she's hoping to move to a larger home where she can set up an exhibition room for clients who come to visit. "It's fun to show work," she says, and an online gallery provides a way for someone with limited resources to do exactly that. But it's not necessarily where she plans to stay. "If you run things on a shoestring, you can build a really great art business online."