Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby
in person, presenting a program of their recent videos.
BAD IDEAS FOR PARADISE by Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby, video, 2001, 20 min.
Bad Ideas for Paradise is a 20-minute episodic videotape. Funny, touching and ambitious in scope, Bad Ideas deals with many of the themes addressed in Duke and Battersby's earlier works: addiction, spirituality, identity, relationship dynamics and the ongoing quest for joy.
BEING FUCKED UP by Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby, video, 2000, 10 min.
A collection of 9 short pieces, Being Fucked Up t incorporates simple animation and live action sequences to create a portrait of the artist's lives as they struggle with addiction, gender identity and alienation. Ultimately hopeful, Being Fucked Up touches on central human themes through a use of narrative which is unconventional yet intelligible, spontaneous yet precise.
SONGS OF PRAISE FOR THE HEART BEYOND CURE by Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby, video, 2006, 15 min.
To describe Cooper Battersby and Emily Vey Duke's new video as ironic doesn't do it justice. Irony implies brittleness, cleverness and world weariness, but these two artists have...a sense of wonder at the endearing weirdness of life and all the vulnerable, furry little creatures immersed in it (mostly us). [...]Songs of Praise for the Heart Beyond Cure consists of a sequence of vignettes that share a kind of bleak humour, but the force of these artists' imaginations makes the whole anything but depressing. -Sarah Milroy, Globe and Mail
THE FINE ARTS by Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby, video, 2001, 3 min.
A short, funny video work about the perils of making images and narratives.
CURIOUS ABOUT EXISTENCE by Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby, video, 2003, 11 min. A collection of short episodes incorporating music, animation, and live action deftly combine humour and humanism to draw the viewer through a number of divergent narrative worlds. The thread that holds these worlds together is a persistent curiosity about the spiritual and material world and its inhabitants: humans, animals, the laws of nature, and so on.
