[Frameworks] March 19 Screening: Unlimited Subjectivity: The Written and Sung Work of Duke and Battersby

[Patrick Friel]

The Nightingale and White Light Cinema Present
 
 
 
Unlimited Subjectivity: The Written and Sung Work of Duke and Battersby
Screening and Book Release
With Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby in Person!
 
Tuesday, March 19 ­ 7:00pm
At the Nightingale (1084 N. Milwaukee Ave.)
 
 
Copies of Mike Hoolboom¹s (Ed.) new book, "The Beauty is Relentless: The
Short Movies of Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby," will be available for
purchase.
 
 
 
The Nightingale and White Light Cinema are please to welcome Canadian
artists and video makers Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby to present a
mini-retrospective of their videos, including two Chicago premieres, and to
continue the launch of a new publication on their work. Many of Duke and
Battersby¹s videos include original songs, sung by Duke, and tonight¹s
program will feature Duke singing a number of these songs live in
accompaniment to the videos.
 
 
³The literary post-punk short movies of Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby
have been tearing up the festival/gallery circuit for the past fifteen years
with their blend of bedroom pop, perverse animations and hopes for fame.²
(Mike Hoolboom)
 
"Often working with the disconnects between human and animal - and their
urge to reconcile the sterile mechanics of our world versus the intuitive
viscerality we keep buried within - their dark sense of humour has yielded a
slate of bizarre taxidermies, installations, videos and sculpture, all
tinged with a gutsy, mystical longing that's sweet, sinister, hilarious and
disturbing all at once." (Murray Whyte, Toronto Star)
 
 
 
 
Program Details:
 
Bad Ideas for Paradise (2001, 20 min)
Steve Reinke on Bad Ideas for Paradise: "There is no such thing as
self-esteem. Self-esteem as a construct is illogical and contradictory, so
its frequent deployment as the lynch-pin of New Age discourse seems to me
satisfyingly appropriate. I don't trust anyone who doesn¹t have frequent
bouts of self-loathing. There is something truly monstrous about the
self-righteous. Eating a well-balanced diet is a horrible act of aggression.
Whenever I hear the word "culture" I think of bacteria mutating under an
ultraviolet light and I'm happy again for a while. Within the petri dish:
unfettered egoless desire, the proliferation of new possibilities ideas made
flesh, uncaring and finally airborne. Empathy is a tool for making the
cruelty more precise. Beauty is independent of taste; the sublime only works
for suckers. Whenever I laugh I feel guilty." 
Bad Ideas for Paradise is a
20-minute episodic videotape. Funny, touching and ambitious in scope, Bad
Ideas continues to deal with many of the themes addressed in Duke and
Battersby's earlier works: addiction, spirituality, identity, relationship
dynamics and the ongoing quest for joy.
 
Perfect Nature World (2002, 4 min) - with live singing
Perfect Nature World is a short single-channel animation. The genesis for
the work was Emily Duke's song of the same name, which describes the
feelings of longing and inadequacy we experience when faced with the
exquisite indifference of the natural world. The song was beautifully
illustrated on a twenty foot scroll of butter-coloured paper by Shary Boyle
and then animated by Cooper Battersby.
 
Songs of Praise for the Heart Beyond Cure (2006, 15 min)
Songs of Praise for the Heart Beyond Cure marks Emily Vey Duke and Cooper
Battersby¹s return to the episodic structure of their earlier works Rapt and
Happy, Being Fucked Up and Bad Ideas for Paradise. As with earlier works,
Songs of Praise takes on difficult, often painful subject matter.  Themes of
addiction, violence, the destruction of the natural world and the agonies of
adolescence are woven through the work, but as Sarah Milroy writes for the
Globe and Mail, the work is "anything but depressing... [it is founded in] a
sense of wonder at the endearing weirdness of life and all the vulnerable,
furry little creatures immersed in it (especially us)."
 
Beauty Plus Pity (2008, 14 min)
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 ³spirit guides² quote Philip Larkin¹s poem, This Be
the Verse, and implore us to ³get out as early as you can² from life and our
parents¹ 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.
 
The Beauty Is Relentless (2010, 4 min) - with live singing
A diary of incidental images: a bedazzled cat in a deciduous wood; a dead or
sleeping woman; a scarred arm; some whisky in a tumbler; a song that makes
promises its singer cannot keep. Commissioned by Mercer Union's Flipworks
project, all footage was shot on a Flip Camera.
 
Here is Everything (2013, 15 min) - with live singing
Here Is Everything presents itself as a message from The Future, as narrated
by a cat and a rabbit, spirit guides who explain that they¹ve decided to
speak to us via a contemporary art video because they understand this to be
our highest form of communication. Their cheeky introduction, however,
belies the complex set of ideas that fill the remainder of the film. Death,
God, and attaining and maintaining a state of Grace are among the thematic
strokes winding their way through the piece, rapturously illustrated with
animation, still and video imagery.
 
 
 
 
 
About:
Cooper Battersby (b. 1971, Penticton British Columbia, Canada) and Emily Vey
Duke (b. 1972, Halifax Nova Scotia, Canada) have been working
collaboratively since 1994. They work in printed matter, installation,
curation and sound, but their primary practice is the production of
single-channel video. Their work has been exhibited in galleries and at
festivals in North and South America and throughout Europe, including the
Walker Center (Minneapolis), The Banff Centre (Banff), The Vancouver Art
Gallery (Vancouver), YYZ (Toronto), The New York Video Festival (NYC), The
European Media Arts Festival (Osnabruck), Impakt (Utrecht) and The Images
Festival (Toronto). Their tape Being Fucked Up (2000) has been awarded
prizes from film festivals in Switzerland, Germany and the USA. Bad Ideas
for Paradise (2002) was purchased for broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation and for the libraries at Harvard and Princeton, and has won
prizes from the NYExpo (NYC) and the Onion City festival (Chicago). I am a
Conjuror (2004) has received prizes from the Ann Arbor Film Festival and the
Onion City Festival.
 
Emily Vey Duke received her BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and
Design, and completed her Masters at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
She then worked for a year as Artistic Director at the Khyber Centre for the
Arts in Halifax, NS.
 
Cooper Battersby received his diploma in computer programming at Okanagan
College, and completed his Masters at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
He was the recipient of a Canada Council Production Grant in 2001. Duke and
Battersby are currently teaching at Syracuse University in Central New York.
 
 
dukeandbattersby.com
whitelightcinema.com
nightingaletheatre.org
 
 
$7-10 Suggested Donation
 
 
 
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