by Ben Jackson
DEER ISLE-Stop by Haystack's Center for Community Programs (in Deer Isle village across from the bank), and you'll find familiar consumer goods with new identities: milk jug butterflies and flowers, broken record ravens, creeping vines of old haul lines.
Emanating from the middle of the gallery space is a bright circular mandala fashioned from bottle caps and cat food tins-the result of the latest in Haystack's continuing community-based residency program.
Artist Bryant Holsenbeck spent a recent week collecting, sorting and assembling the show, together with students from the elementary and high schools, volunteers from the Island Nursing Home and the community at large.
Open to the public until Friday, November 20, every week day from 8:30 a.m. until 5 p.m., the exhibit draws together Holsenbeck's vision of "post consumer" art, broad local participation and Haystack's role as an organizer of public art programs. That, and about 20,000 bottle caps.
Community support came in the form of donated bottle caps, collected by local businesses and organizations including M.D. Joyce hardware, Lily's Café, Harbor Café, the Island Community Center and many anonymous individual patrons of the arts.
Holsenbeck is a North Carolina-based sculptor and environmental artist with "10 years of collecting" bottle caps and "about 100,000 caps" to her name, though she adds, "I've never found anyone who wanted to count them all for me."
The former basket-weaver described the thinking behind the development of the project: "Aborigines used what they had in their environment [so] what do we have in ours?" Bottle caps and other throw-away consumables "are everywhere and it's our culture." Holsenbeck describes her role as a "hunter-gatherer."
In addition to documenting the sheer quantity and variety of bottle caps and plastic bags, Holsenbeck says there is beauty in them as well, and using the mandala in particular is a way to bring out their aesthetic qualities.
"Mandalas were used by Native Americans, the Aztecs, Tibetans...every culture has their own," says Holsenbeck. Mandalas serve different functions in different cultures, typically a religious one. In our own culture, says Holsenbeck, she hoped to find a way to use these materials and present the sometimes less-than-beautiful process of our consumption into something visually pleasing-perhaps making it easier to look at consumer culture.
Autumn Robbins is a sophomore at Deer Isle-Stonington High School who helped construct the mandala in her art class. She says she "didn't know what it was going to look like until the last day," and that adding her individual "spin on it" felt "pretty powerful."
Dylan Siebert, a junior, also contributed to the exhibit and described the process as "meditative" and rewarding to go from "bags of colors" to the finished product.
Haystack typically has two such residencies a year-earlier this year kinetic sculptor Arthur Ganson also worked with students on a large public piece.
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