‘Wings and Things’ photo exhibit lands at The Corner School in Granville

July 28, 2025 | By Kate Youngdahl Stauss 

A closeup look at a dragonfly through the lens of Julie Parker in the exhibition, 'Wings and Things.'

The luminous photography of longtime Waitsfield resident Julie Parker takes flight with “Wings and Things,” a solo exhibition at The Corner School Resource Center of Granville. 

The show opens on Sunday, Aug. 3, from 2 to 4 p.m., and it continues on Sundays through August.

The exhibit features large images of insects transformed by light and color into beautiful, otherworldly creatures, marrying Parker’s twin passions of art and science. “I turned my camera into a microscope,” Parker explains. “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, and 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,” she said. 

Now the Parker basement is full of petri dishes and insects awaiting their turn in the spotlight. Using a light table, Parker meticulously photographs her subjects, revealing hidden details. 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.” 

A self-defined “math kid,” Parker tells how she hit her artistic stride in high school when she got a camera. “I was never really satisfied with my skills as a painter,” she recalls, “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,” Parker said. 

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 full-time 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 to skiing and other activities in the Valley, 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,” she shared.

Parker said she 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 nearby towns to attend the Aug. 3 opening reception, both to see Parker’s extraordinary pictures and to meet more neighbors.

“Wings and Things” will be on view at the Corner School on Sundays, 2-4 p.m., throughout August. More information online at cornerschoolvt.org.