by Allie Schaitel
ALL CSArtist Hannah O’Hare Bennett grapples with external discord through her art, often creating the same object over and over again in very different materials. Bennett’s installations are an opportunity for viewers to perform a sort of mental archaeology of their own, seeking connections between the strange objects she presents to them.
CSArt shares are available for purchase here. For just $300, you receive 10 unique pieces of art handcrafted by local artists. Half shares are also available. CSArt shares have been called the best value in Wisconsin, and they're a great way to support local artists.
ALL Review: What was the appeal of CSArt for you—what made you want to get involved?
Hannah O’Hare Bennett: My first career was in organic farming and the overarching local and organic food system. This was years ago, when CSAs were still pretty novel, and I found the direct relationship between producer and consumer really exciting. I worked at a number of CSAs before finally leaving farming for a few reasons, among them being that temperamentally, I'm not really suited to farming. For better or worse, I like to have a lot of creative control over a project, and you can't do that on a farm, especially someone else's farm.
But I still really like the concept of CSAs! I'm really interested to see what kinds of connections can be made with shareholders. I also know, from working with CSA farms, that some people just love anything you can pull up and put in a box, and others are mostly excited about heirloom tomatoes and corn but leave the kohlrabi and weird root vegetables for someone else. CSAs are more appropriate for the former than the latter. (And that's okay—know thyself.)
ALL: Can you tell us more about your CSArt project?
HOB: I'm interested in evolution and change, and how they manifest in physical form. My piece is actually two pieces—a soft fabric hand sculpture and a comb made out of paper pulp. I got really hung up on the comb shape last year, and it occurred to me that the hand was actually the first comb. And that shape exists in nature, too. The piece also expresses the range of textures possible using fiber, which can be almost as hard as ceramic, and obviously very soft.
Drawing on anthropology and natural history museums, my piece is partly inspired by displays of objects that represent some story or cultural phenomenon. A lot of those objects are nice to look at, but there's also this tension of not being able to know the whole story, or experience the circumstances that gave rise to the object. So there's this kind of delicious frustration of not understanding that can draw you in or make you seek out more information.
ALL: What would you like potential shareholders to know about the value of collecting art, especially in the context of CSArt?
HOB: Being an artist is such a strange way to live in a capitalistic society. The way I spend my time and the way I make a living is probably pretty opaque to most people. I wish that I could give away my art to people that really love it. The problem with that is that I've spent so much time and energy learning the skills it takes to create it, and I need to pay my rent.
In a traditional CSA, the farmer typically gets the money for the shares at the beginning of the year, when cash is most needed. I've heard it said that the people who pay into a CSA are really paying for the farmer to take good care of the soil and his/her skills—the vegetables are just the result of that. It's not a perfect metaphor, because art is inherently a more personal activity than farming, and vegetables get consumed and art stays in your home, but it's still an interesting thing to think about.
CSArt makes it easy to acquire pieces from a wide range of local artists. And the show that will be up at Arts + Lit Lab will show larger pieces (at least for me). So if there's someone who's just getting started collecting art, this is a great opportunity to figure out what you want to live with in your space.
