The photography of Waitsfield resident Julie Parker takes flight with “Wings and Things,” a solo exhibition at The Corner School Resource Center of Granville, Vermont, opening on Sunday, August 3, from 2 to 4 p.m. and continuing on Sundays throughout August.
The show features large images of insects transformed by light and color into otherworldly creatures, marrying Parker’s twin passions of art and science. “I turned my camera into a microscope,” she said. “I’m in awe of natural structures. I’m always wondering how things got to be the way they are. The closer I look, the more I see.”
Sparked by her art group's prompt of “awakening,” Parker started this project with cicadas. It soon snowballed. She found a dragonfly in her pool filter. Her husband, scientist and inventor Bill Parker, gave her a luna moth preserved in a petri dish. The next thing she knew, “I just started collecting more bugs.” Now the Parker basement is full of petri dishes and insects awaiting their star turn.
Using a light table, Parker photographs her subjects, revealing hidden mysteries. As strange evolutionary forces come into focus, her work also raises the question of scale. According to the artist, humans live in a world measured in millimeters to miles, but “there’s a whole other world we don’t observe – millimeters to microns. And a whole world that is gigantic as well.” Parker marvels that all of these experiences are happening simultaneously, though we usually only perceive our own.
A self-defined “math kid,” Parker hit her artistic stride in high school when she got a camera. “I was never really satisfied with my skills as a painter,” she recalled, “but the camera gave me that opening.” While an undergrad at UVM, she double-majored in physics and art, the only student in her class with that distinctive mix.
“The process of making an artistic thing is the same process as a scientific research project,” said Parker. Both require making decisions and following intuition: “You’re heading down the hallway, and you think you’re going through the door at the end, but you notice other doors on the way and think, ‘This is pretty interesting.’”
After receiving a Master of Science in Visual Studies from MIT, Parker moved fulltime to Waitsfield in 1989 where she and Bill raised three children and started the technology development company, Creative MicroSystems. An avid athlete, she appreciates the easy access of skiing and other activities, but she noted the area’s greatest asset is the community: “The type of people I gravitate to are creative, smart doers. There’s a lot of people who get outside and do here.”
Parker is excited to be showing her work at the Corner School, which she called “a terrific space and a terrific project.” The board of the nonprofit which renovated the historic one-room schoolhouse to create a community space, is encouraging newcomers to our towns to attend the opening reception, both to see Parker’s extraordinary pictures and meet the neighbors.
“Wings and Things” at the Corner School, Sundays from 2 to 4 throughout August. For more information, visit cornerschoolvt.org.
