Tuessday, March 1, 2005 at 7:30 PM

One of Maine’s most distinctive photographers, known for her wry images of family life, Melonie Bennett gives a slide talk about her work onTuesday, March 1.

Bennett, whose work is represented in the current Bates College Museum of Art exhibition “New Acquisitions: Local and Global Contemporary Photography,” emerged on the Maine art scene during the 1990s with depictions of the sometimes-funny, sometimes-edgy happenings in an extended Maine family.“My photography is on ongoing visual diary of my family and friends and the times we share together,” she writes in an artist’s statement. “I developed my point of view growing up on a dairy farm in Gorham, Maine.”

“To avoid tension we developed ways of coping mostly through laughing, eating and talking,” she writes. “I watched what went on around me at home very closely and this is where I developed the way I see. I love to point things out that I can’t believe are happening in front of me and share them with others.”

Bennett, who emerged on the Maine art scene in the mid-1990s, has shown her work in virtually every leading gallery and museum in the state, in galleries in New York City, and around the Northeast.

Sponsored by the Mellon Learning Associates Program at Bates, and presented by the Department of Art and Visual Culture, the talk is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please call 207-786-6224.