First National Parrot A MONA Moment By Ron Roth Director Museum of Nebraska Art

"My hair grows an inch--I too am a universe." So writes poet Theodore Roethke contemplating the wonder of the common thing. Here is a box, housing a discreetly sized universe, one we can take in and contemplate in a glance; where a mysterious, puzzling unity of images, symbols, the common with the arcane exist together in a harmony beyond logical understanding, but entirely satisfying, transcendentally beautiful.

We find an assemblage of the familiar, a toy from our childhood we had forgotten, embedded in a field of color so intense, so right, it vibrates something sacred and unknowable to anyone but ourself. Here the cabinet of curiosities includes the common--shells, rings and marbles, an old snapshot--transformed by the artist's alchemy. We follow them through a landscape of obscure associations, where omnipotent dreams, disturbing or calming--whatever you like--suspend our beliefs and where we find to our delight and our surprise a sense of security, well-being in the beautiful confines of this mysterious space, this universe we have found in a box the size of an old medicine cabinet. Perhaps it is, an old medicine cabinet--a box like the one created by Dave Stewart, a custodian in Hastings, Nebraska who creates these curiosity cabinets, each with their obscure, whimsical, beautiful destinations.

Here in his assemblage art box titled First National Parrot, a cutout of a parrot is perched on a small branch--perched, it appears, in its, well, its own little office--the office of the First National Parrot, casually pecking at a Ritz cracker propped conveniently at beak level. Office decor? Contemporary Habitat. Tasteful earth colors--nothing brash, strictly corporate. There is some accommodation to color: a bright row of multicolored buttons tacked to the side of the base of the Parrot's perch--all very restrained and tasteful.

The sense of causal clutter is deceiving, and the compositional harmony of the assemablage is purposeful. There is a precise balance of rectangular forms. A long, vertical, rectangular wire mesh anchors the central third of the box. A small, brown-framed picture, slightly askew, on the upper right corner of the box is nicely counterbalanced on the opposite side of the composition by a page of writing from a journal. Indeed, there are twelve identifiable squares equally dividing the plane of the assemblage. This provides a coherent structural skeleton to the seeming casual clutter of the found objects, objects which Stewart deftly fuses into a balanced composition. First National Parrot: a deceivingly sophisticated, subtle and whimsical work by a Nebraska original.