Tracing the Ephemeral – When I was a young boy my mother and I made a gingerbread house cake for my birthday. It was the first time I felt creative ownership of something I had made. When it came time to cut the cake to celebrate my birthday - I had a tantrum. I forbade anyone from eating the cake I had made. The cake sat on the refrigerator until it became stale. My mother took the cake and placed it under the peach tree in the backyard of our Ohio home. I watched for hours as black birds flew from branch to cake and back to branch, eating my artwork bit by bit. I’ve always loved observing animals as they show individual personalities. Most collective nouns have fallen into disuse. Words like chattering, gaggle, and murder, describe something more in the realm of general feeling. They describe something one can’t put their finger on, but is real none the less. A culture living closer to the natural world has more use for this vocabulary. My focus is to depict the quality collective nouns describe. The work in this show represents a study of the fleeting gestural perambulations of creatures who thrive in large numbers. I am inspired by the drunken flight of fruit flies, the graceful arching of starlings, and the cheerless glide of the crow. The attention to pattern in Margaret Bourke White’s photographs and the motion studies of Harold Edgerton have always inspired. They both make little distinction between the science and the art of observation. These films are not time lapses but rather an extension of moments normally too quick to grasp.