In Praise of Garden Globes A MONA Moment By Ron Roth Director Museum of Nebraska Art

Periodically, one comes across a painting nearly overwhelming in its virtuosity. Omaha artist Robert Therien's oil painting, Three Gazing Globes, in the collection of the Museum of Nebraska Art, belies the notion that superealist style is hollow at its core.

A trio of common garden globes in the corner of a greenhouse stare down the viewer, each with its each with its own identity, or better, personality. Therein has carefully calibrated their positions so that each reveals an entirely different view of the greenhouse. The views absorb us as they glide gracefully into infinity. In the circular refraction of the globe, they are each their own little universe, recreating and reconfiguring the same little patch of greenhouse.

The larger globe on the left casts rich, Adriatic blue through the greenhouse panes. Long shadows tranquilly creep over the floorboards and ethereally climbs the sculpted bust in the foreground. Therien toys with our perceptions as we puzzle over the multiple reflections of the globes within the globes. There is a quartet of them within the larger globes, each with their own two eyes that are smaller reflections of their own images. Is Therien toying with us here? Are these reflections faithful to the laws of optics? Or are they serving his own compositional purposes. This little quartet has endearing human qualities. And they keep multiplying. I keep thinking of that classic Star Trek episode, The Trouble with Tribbles. You know those cute little furry balls that keep multiplying much to the consternation of Captain Kirk and crew.

Here science and art meet, and our expectations of visual reality are questioned. Is science or art pre-eminent in these reflected images? Perhaps a combination of both. Here is the opportunity for the artist to create visual variations on a theme. These globes filter our vision into intriguing visual paradoxes-some which illuminate, some which puzzle .A banal ornament of the backyard becomes a beautiful vehicle of multiple imagery, and a delicious intellectual conundrum.