The Friendly Falcons and Their Friend the Snake is the collaboration of artists Jeffrey Kurosaki and Tara Pelletier. Kurosaki was born in Honolulu, HI, and Pelletier was born in Hartford, CT. They met in graduate school at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI, and have been collaborating as The Friendly Falcons since 2006. They have exhibited and performed internationally, including a seven-city European tour called The Cactus Duet in 2010. On the same trip, they were visiting artists at Funen Academy of Art in Odense, Denmark. They received the Toby Devon Lewis Award in 2007 and were Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Swing Space artists in 2010. In 2011, Kurosaki and Pelletier have a solo exhibition in the Sunroom Project Space at Wave Hill Cultural Center; and in 2012 they will be artists-in-residence at Sculpture Space in Utica, NY.

Combining pared-down landscapes, natural phenomena, and personified animals with the history of specific sites, we create multilayered narratives using sculpture, drawing, performance, and music. We use song lyrics, in combination with a scripted dialogue, to express the themes of each of our shows, rather than a conventional method of linear storytelling. In this way, our music creates an emotive undertone that operates with our visual components to build an overall experience. Much of the content of our work is derived from the places we have lived and anecdotes from our travels. We are particularly interested in the evolution of urban sites from natural environments, and, through their subsequent use and abandonment, how they become natural or 'wild' again. Fantastic imaginings of what has taken place in these transitional timelines become the content for our narratives.