art is fear • Kriston Capps revisits the bubble for WCP

art is fear

This coming May 2011, for one week, the artist Agnes Bolt will move into the home of the very sociable and curious Philippa Hughes to playfully explore the dynamics between an artist and an art collector. With a naive optimism and subtle social critique the project will manifest itself with a large obtrusive structure situated within Philippa’s home in which the artist will live. The presence of the artist will be impossible to ignore. A series of rules, exercises, communication systems and bonding experiences will dictate the interactions between the two as will video cameras given to both parties. Both are required to follow the rules but mischief and expectations of an open spirited dynamic is highly encouraged.

The project tries to conflate the traditional role of the artist as producer and the collector as consumer to create an experience that both can take part in, react to and fully engage. Both can take ownership of the results of the time spent together and a furthering of the conversation about art’s impact in the world can be examined.

Kriston Capps revisits the bubble for WCP

Kriston Capps revisited the bubble at Project 4 Gallery and had this to say:

Bolt’s show with Hughes was predicated on a sort of Real World–esque question: What happens when the collector collects the artist herself? The tightly edited presentation with Barlow was both more polite and more real.

In this show that she calls Dealing, Agnes also exhibits the remnants of the distinctly different interactive performance project she executed over the summer with fellow art collector Philip Barlow.

That Capps thinks that a tightly edited presentation is “more real” than the real thing makes me realize how complicated the relationship between Agnes and me became and how difficult it would be to sum up neatly all of its meanings with a few objects. I suppose that’s the nature and difficulty of performance art.