Fast-forward to this century. The butterfly chair, designed by the Argentinean architect Jorge Ferrari-Hardoy in 1938 and since knocked off by numerous furniture-makers, is hot again. Butterfly exhibits and gardens are proliferating like farmers' markets.

Contemporary artists, mindful of all things environmentally friendly, aren't missing a beat. Judging from "Metamorphosis," an exhibition at the Abington Art Center organized by former director Amy Lipton, the butterfly and its cousin the moth have caught more artists' imaginations than ever before. Perhaps, as Lipton suggests in her essay for the show, it's because contemporary artists view their own working processes as transformative. Whatever the reason, in the works of the 15 artists here the butterfly and the moth have metamorphosed in art as never before.

Consider John Kalymnios' pieces, in which he has wired real butterfly wings to mechanized rods that move them in a fluttering motion. Set inside Plexiglas boxes, they prompt memories of those glass vitrines and dioramas at the local natural-history museum that piqued your curiosity as a child. But they also hint at a future world that can't support nature's delicate creatures.

Using entirely different means and materials, Michael Gallagher, Richard Ryan, Ben Snead, and Susan Magnus play on the drama that multiple juxtapositions of shapes, both still and moving, can produce.

Gallagher's mixed-media on linen works look like found photographic reproductions of butterflies cut from magazines and assembled into complex collages reminiscent of kaleidoscope views; Ryan's digital photographs, printed on large scrolls, catch butterflies in blurred motion, in a kind of swarming, controlled chaos out of which other kinds of larger images seem to emerge.

Ben Snead, by contrast, has created a perfectly ordered world in his large paintings of repeating patterns of frogs, fish, butterflies, and other animals arranged in grid formation. Magnus conjures the lightness of butterflies and their relationship to their environment in her installation of hundreds of butterfly shapes cut from reflective Mylar and pinned to a wall. The slightest breeze causes them to flutter and remind all sentient gallerygoers (who are also mirrored on their surfaces) of their carbon footprints.

The butterfly is even a template for an ecologically self-sustaining public landscape designed by Patricia Johanson. Her plan for Vernal Pools (Catagramma mionina), intended as a breeding ground for threatened amphibians, organizes edible native wetland plants into shallow water-filled sculptural depressions after the patterns and colors of a butterfly's wing.

"Metamorphosis" gathers similarly transformative works by Linda Burnham, David Chow, Tera Galanti, Kate Javens, Huib Petersen, Lamar Peterson, Joseph Scheer, Doug and Mike Starn, and Michelle Stuart.

Face time

I prefer Jacobson's much smaller, black oil-and-sand underpaintings and rapidograph ink drawings, which show her face more clearly and seem more tangibly the result of her process of working from multiple photographs and direct photocopies of her face (yes, she presses her face to the actual machine).

Jacobson's underpaintings, in particular, capture the look of photocopies, with the tooth of the canvas showing through them. Their white edges add to the resemblance to paper, and suggest that she paints her works on unstretched canvas, then later stretches them with the intention of letting that unpainted edge creep over. Their velvety darkness also brings Seurat's drawings to mind.