San Diego-based artist Deborah Small’s project, titled Metamorphosis/Metamorfosis, explored the life and original research of seventeenth-century entomologist Maria Sybylla Merian. The installation drew on Merian’s observations as a naturalist and her prolific engraved records of flora and fauna in the Dutch colony of Surinam. Apart from the work performed by Merian, the interest for Small was in the intersection of colonizer and the colonized, created by Merian’s presence as a white European woman in a society and social system reliant on patriarchy, both at home and in the colony.
Curator: Hal Fisher
Organizer: Timken Museum of Art
Venue: Timken Museum of Art, San Diego
Faculty Development Grant, California State University, San Marcos; The Putnam Foundation.