Mystery Planet A MONA Moment By Ron Roth Director Museum of Nebraska Art

The Elizabethans of Shakespeare's era called it the music of the spheres. The sun, the moon, and the known planets--Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn--each occupied its own sphere in concentric circles around the earth. It was thought that the planets in their motion around the earth created music, "the whole forming a perfect harmony of sound," according to Shakespearean scholar, G. B. Harrison.

I see this celestial music in a mixed media work by Nebraska artist, Elmer Holzrichter in the collection of the Museum of Nebraska Art. Titled Mystery Planet, common objects like cardboard and colored paper circles left from a hole punch are synthesized into assemblages of wit and delight.

Like the Elizabethan cosmology, in Mystery Planet we see a series of concentric spheres, one surrounding the other, some of them dappled with small, metallic colored circles, many clustering around the central planet--a pie made of radiating slices of thin cardboard.

Here is the flavor of a jigsaw puzzle. We see, to our surprise, cardboard has a range of nuanced colors. On the outer fringe of the spheres we see a field of multi-shaped, cardboard triangles--each with its own, unique, individualized shape and identity, many in different, subtle ranges of hues; each with its own colored circle in the center. Like geometric Amoeba, they cling to the edge of the Mystery Planet, their odd shapes and candy colors suggesting a whirring movement.

As we head into the center of the planet things become more ordered. There is a buffer zone of largish triangular/rectangular cutouts without colored circles composing the outside rim of the planet. This barrier puts an end to the frenzy of the amoeba field, and the next layer of sphere--long, carefully cut rectangles anchored by a colored circle at each end, all of uniform size, continues the more orderly tone of things as we approach the center of the planet.

The next two circle bands surround a starburst of multicolored paper dots, their numbers increasing as your eye moves closer to the central circle, the core of the mystery planet--a fancy and delight, this mystery planet created artist Elmer Holzrichter.