Recent Acquisitions to the Permanent Collection
on view until March 28, 2010
With the permanent collection, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia aims to preserve and exhibit visual arts for the benefit of both residents and visitors to the province. In building the collection, the Gallery continues to focus on artists with strong ties to the Atlantic Provinces, Canadian artists, both historical and contemporary, and international artists whose work complements that of others already in holding. The recent acquisition of a boxed hard drive containing 7 single-channel video works by collaborators Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby responds to the Gallery’s priorities, serving as a significant addition to the collection in the area of contemporary film and video.This catalogue includes key works produced by the artists over the last decade: Songs of Praise for the Heart Beyond a Cure (2006), The New freedom Founders (2005), Curious about Existence (2003), Bad ideas for Paradise (2001), The Fine Arts (2001), Being Fucked Up (2000), and Rapt and Happy (1998).

Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby have gained increasing critical attention for their thought provoking video works. In the fall 2009 issue of Canadian Art, the pair was included in “Ten artists to watch,” a feature segment with essays on emerging Canadian artists at the leading edge of creative production.  Here, curator Jon Davies takes a deep look at this duo’s practice in his text “Possibilities of Redemption.”  Davies writes:

“Each of Duke and Battersby’s works is a compendium of multiple voices.  They contain witty, keenly felt songs, simple animations and found footage vignettes brought to life by the duo’s narrations (in which voices are run backwards, are manipulated to emulate children, robots or animals, or to just convey “anonymity,” and are haphazardly accented). Intertitles and aphoristic texts silently drift by, the voice of a higher authority perhaps; the artists pull faces, enact rituals, stage confessions, test limits. This dynamic polyvocality renders each work a series of provisional propositions and hypothesis: bad (and good) ideas for paradise.”

The works of Duke and Battersby engage often difficult subject matter.  The perpetual quest for happiness, adolescent angst, self-loathing, addiction, and the destruction of the natural world (and our indifference therein), for instance, serve as recurrent themes that permeate the wry narrative structure of their videos. Though, as Sarah Milroy writes for the Globe and Mail, their 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).”

Emily Vey Duke (b. 1972, Halifax, NS) and Cooper Battersby (b. 1971, Penticton, BC) have been working collaboratively for over fifteen years. Beyond video, their practice includes printed matter, sculpture, sound and curation. Their work has been exhibited in galleries, museums and film festivals throughout North America, South America and Europe, including the Walker Center (Minneapolis), Banff Centre (Banff), Vancouver Art Gallery (Vancouver), European Media Arts Festival (Osnabruck), and Images Festival (Toronto). In 2005 Duke and Battersby won the Aliant New Media Award and were also nominated for the Sobey Art Award.