COLLEGEVILLE, PA.- The Philip & Muriel Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College presents Exotica: Photographs By Sally Grizzell Larson through March 6, 2005. Larson's lush new work exhibits her concern with how the lure of the beautiful and exotic can evoke and comment on a culture of post-colonial desire, appropriation, and acquisition. The show is rich and deep with references drawn from the history of art, textiles and furnishings, and the traces of material culture from around the world. Her photographs create a sociological, philosophical and political commentary, and in the tradition of still life paintings, make haunting reference to the influence of the human beings absent from the scene.

The artist describes her premise for this new series of lambda prints as follows: "We in the West have always felt the compulsion to collect and preserve artifacts of the exotic, and in turn have been quick and efficient in transforming the once authentic into an artificial and standardized experience, often for the purpose of constructing the illusion of a personal sense of high style and worldliness. The journey from ordinary to seemingly exotic is often and easily mediated by a third party in the form of interior designers and/or architects - purveyors of taste who reciprocate influence with the editors of the glossy publications that help shape our desires and set the tone for the unattainable perfection of this romanticized and self-gratifying fiction.

Unlike 16th-18th-century European cabinets of curiosity, which, with their specimens of natural objects more often than not elicited knowledge and wonder (though these, too, were a luxurious diversion for the elite), these contemporary tableaux remain exclusively ornamental. The act of transforming the domestic space into one with a fabricated sense of the exotic is reminiscent of colonial appropriations. In this instance, however, the colonization is accomplished without the personal commitment of arduous physical currency. As a result, the original, messy colonial experience, for example, becomes abstract and marginalized to the point of inconsequence - an example of our taste inadvertently reflecting the history of our imperial politics."