We know D.C. Get our free newsletter to stay in the know.

Maybe you missed Agnes Bolt‘s week-long live-in performance project at the home of arts maven Philippa Hughes. And perhaps you skipped “Dealing,” the artist’s surprising solo show that just closed at Project 4 Gallery and featured artifacts from the Hughes encampment and another of Bolt’s impositions on our city’s poor art collectors. No matter. You still have a chance to see work by Bolt, who won’t leave D.C. well enough alone.
After de-installing her show at Project 4, Bolt made her way to the Occupy D.C. grounds at McPherson Square and set up her bubble—the makeshift plastic enclosure in which she lived inside Hughes’s apartment for her imposition-slash-intervention.
Last night, between the stop at Project 4 and dinner with her Project 4 project-mate Philip Barlow, Bolt erected the plastic bubble at the southwest corner of McPherson Square. She said that she appreciates that the object can take on a new context. (Here’s one: It’s nearly invisible at night.) Bolt had considered staying overnight in the plastic bubble, but the rain and lack of ground cover underneath the structure made that seem unfeasible, she said.
Bolt is back in Pittsburgh now, but she intends to do what she can to guide the bubble’s development from afar. She would like to see it built into a sauna or greenroom and wants to help to facilitate those projects. “I’m not completely abandoning it,” she says. “I want it to have its own life outside there, too.”
For the time being, Bolt doesn’t have any concrete plans for bringing more work to D.C. She doesn’t know whether she’ll have another show with Project 4, she says. For one thing, her work takes a lot of time to develop; it would take her a year to mount another show like the one she put up. “Putting the show together was great fun but also totally out of my own pocket,” she adds. She says she doesn’t know whether Project 4 is interested in inviting her back, for that matter.
So the bubble is what D.C. viewers have of her work for the foreseeable future. It’s still work, she says, even at the camp. “I’m not a protester,” she says, “but I support and sympathize with the movement.”
UPDATE: Bolt had dinner with Philip Barlow, not Philippa Hughes, as this story initially reported.
This isn't a paywall.
We don't have one. Readers like you keep our work free for everyone to read. If you think that it's important to have high quality local reporting we hope you'll support our work with a monthly contribution.