EXHIBITION DETAILS

Swarm Murmurations | Leah Sobsey

January 1 - December 1, 2022

Gallery Hours - Thursday – Saturday 12 – 5 pm
First Friday Gallery Walk - Friday, January 1th from 6 – 9 pm
Artist Talk - 6:30 pm on Friday, January 1

Exhibition Location
Gallery Name
321 Maple St, Fort Collins, CO 80524

STATEMENT

Starling Murmurations and butterfly Swarms rely on intricate and nuanced communication between species. The delicate dance of the Starlings murmuration is described by Scientist, Grainger Hunt as “A dazzling cloud, swirling, pulsating, drawing together to the thinnest of waists, then wildly twisting in pulses of enlargement and diminution, a fluid choreography of funnels, ribbons, and hourglasses, spills and mixing, ever in motion. Dense in one moment, diffuse in the next.”

Murmurations have long evaded scientific logic and understanding. It wasn’t until recently that physicists have come to understand the complexity and beauty in the unified movements of Starling formations. Like one long game of “telephone”, the birds communicate in small groups of six or seven, passing on critical movement shifts to escape their prey, the peregrine falcon."The change in the behavioral state of one animal affects and is affected by that of all other animals in the group, no matter how large the group is. Scale-free correlations provide each animal with an effective perception range much larger than the direct interindividual interaction range, thus enhancing global response to perturbations."Starlings are an invasive species, brought to the United States from Europe, specifically Central Park, in the late 1800 ‘s by Shakespeare enthusiasts who wanted every bird mentioned in Shakespeare’s scripts to be represented in the United States. There are now over 200 million of the invasive species in the US and are considered by Ornithologists to be a menace due to their aggressive behavior.

I was fortunate to witness the dazzling choreography of a murmuration in Greensboro, NC. I photographed still images and shot video of the incredible patterns and formations; the sheer number of birds was exquisite, overwhelming and slightly terrifying and the noise deafening.
I had been photographing bird skins at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and found the intersection of the lifeless birds at the museum and the beautifully alive birds in the murmuration intoxicating. It was a poignant reminder about the cyclical nature of life: wildly twisting and ever in motion to lifeless and still, tucked away in the dark drawers deep within the bowels of the museum collections. The stark contrast led me to The Swarm, an installation comprised of over 500 cyanotypes butterflies thus creating my own false migrations and swirling masses of butterflies.

leah@leahsobsey.com