Wild & Wondrous
July 2 - August 30 at Hammond Hall
Reception: Sunday, July 2, 4:00 pm
Gallery Hours: 1:00 - 4:00 pm on the following days:
Thursday, July 6
Sunday, July 9
Sunday, July 16, Tuesday, July 18 and Thursday, July 20
Sunday, July 23 and Tuesday, July 25
Sunday, July 30, Tuesday, August 1 and Thursday, August 3
Sunday, August 6, Tuesday, August 8 and Thursday, August 10
Tuesday, August 22 and Thursday, August 24
Sunday, August 27 and Tuesday, August 29
The Exhibit
For more than a decade, Margie Patlak has split her time between Corea, Maine and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Each time she returned to Philadelphia’s cityscape, what she missed most were those astonishing Maine moments of natural beauty: fog lumbering down the bay at dawn, erasing all boundaries and imparting a sense of the unknown; morning dew anointing each pine needle and flower petal with sparkling pendants of water; a solitary loon swimming in the bay trailed by its glistening wake.
These surprising encounters in nature disrupted her normal frame of reference, restoring a childlike sense of wonder and awe. Her photobook Wild and Wondrous: Nature’s Artistry on the Coast of Maine is the end result of her attempts to encapsulate those fleeting moments in Maine, to imprint on paper impressions of something much more profound.
SAFA will be sponsoring an exhibit at Hammond Hall of a selection of photos from Wild and Wondrous that showcase what makes Maine particularly unique, including its unusual light, many islands, omnipresent rocks, frequent fog, startling wildlife, vast forests, and striking intersections and tides.
The Artist
Margie Patlak is an award-winning science and nature writer, memoirist, and photographer. Her photographs have been exhibited at the Bar Harbor Airport, at Northeast Harbor Library on Mount Desert, and will be part of an exhibit at Cove St. Arts gallery in Portland this fall.
Her photographs have also been featured in a number of newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal, the Ellsworth American and the Portland Press Herald, as well as on News Center Maine’s television show 207 and on B&W Minimalism Magazine’s Instagram site.
Her articles and personal essays have appeared in numerous newspapers, magazines and literary journals, and her book More Than Meets the Eye: Exploring Nature and Loss on the Coast of Maine was given an “Outstanding Book” award by the American Society of Journalists and Authors in the memoir category in 2022.
Her photobook Wild and Wondrous: Nature’s Artistry on the Coast of Maine will be published by Down East Books/Rowman and Littlefield in the summer of 2023.