DEPARTMENT OF ART AND ART HISTORY
UMKC GALLERY OF ART
September 15-October 17, 2009
reception and artist lecture:
Thursday, October 15, 5:00-8:00 PM
The contemporary fables of Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby propose that existence is abject, farcical, and messy. In their richly textured videos, Duke and Battersby employ live action footage, scavenged images, and simple animations to create episodic structures that evince a simultaneously utopian and dystopian world view.
Beauty Plus Pity sets a colourful single-channel video within a lush viewing environment populated by costumed taxidermic animals. Presented in seven parts, the video considers the potential for goodness amidst the troubled relations between God, humanity, animals, parents and children. While an animated cast of animal “spirit guides” quote Philip Larkin’s poem, This Be the Verse, and implore us to “get out as early as you can” from life and our parents’ grasp, a hunter dreams of a zoo where he might lie next to tranquilized animals calmed of their savagery. A senile and unstable God stumbles, forgets to take his medication, and turns frost into diamonds. Beauty Plus Pity contemplates the shame and beauty of existence; it is part apologia, part call to arms.
Emily Vey Duke (born in Halifax, 1972) and Cooper Battersby (born in Penticton, 1971) currently reside in Syracuse, New York. Collaborators since 1994, their work has been exhibited in galleries and at festivals nationally and internationally, including the Vancouver Art Gallery (Vancouver) and the Images Festival (Toronto), as well as the Walker Center (Minneapolis), and the New York Video Festival (NYC). Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby are represented by Jessica Bradley Art + Projects, Toronto.
For more information on the artists, visit their website at http://www.dukeandbattersby.com
