Emily Vey Duke

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.

The Infernal Grove is an unsystematic structural analysis of drug use, addiction and recovery (not necessarily in that order). It is anti-carceral, anti-prohibition and seeks to amplify the voices of radical harm-reductionists and their coalitions.

Episodic in nature, Curious About Existence reacts ultimately against an uninspired but prevailing acceptance of moral terms. It begins with a song of worship, an ode to the looming nastiness of our organic existence. A celebration of disorder and entropy, the opening song seems borne of a curiosity about the possibilities of joy and freedom. In a more lighthearted segment, a squirrel and beaver converse about how everybody feels bad a lot of the time, which is compounded by the stupid things they do as a result. By enjoying the spectacle of the river creatures’ conversation, we are guided through another chapter of anxiety about shame with the opportunity for impunity.

Based on dreams (waking and non-waking) by pals and acquaintances of noted American writer Lucy Corin, the night after the epochal US election of 2016. A bevy of speakers weigh in on the new world.

Onikuma is Japanese yokai, a demon bear known for chasing horses. Surrounded by a foreign landscape, two women will understand that demons can come in different forms.

A terrible virus finally brings down the internet, and humans look out from the wreckage in the aftermath. Five weigh in with personal recollections: pensive, disbelieving, grieving, philosophical. We used to have movie stars and famous musicians. Now we had each other.

An episodic videotape combining animation and live action sequences to create a portrait of the artist's lives as they struggle with addiction, gender identity and alienation.

A roving search across endless colour-fields gradually reveals a solitary singer, struggling to be heard over distortion and doppelgangers.

“What would another world look like, one that is carried by this feeling of empathy, of mutual love between humans and animals, between species? How would our relationship with a largely domesticated nature and environment change? How would established relationships of power and strength be redefined with this thought?”—Tasja Langenbach.

Songs of Praise for the Heart Beyond Cure is a fourteen-minute experimental video that unfolds through a series of short episodes. "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

Lesser Apes tells the story of a love affair between a primatologist, Farrah and a female bonobo ape, Meema. Bonobos are the species with which humans share the most DNA, but unlike our species, they are matriarchal, live without conflict, and are unabashedly sexual. A paean to perversion, the film combines animation, live action and song to challenge attitudes about sex, language and our relationship to nature.

Fourteen year old bone collector Maxine Rose is looking for validation from her heroes. These include primatologist Jane Goodall, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and New Zealand teen pop star Lorde.

Presented in seven parts, Beauty Plus Pity 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.

A darkly comic film that follows a woman through a life characterized by damage, loss, humour and joy. With a score that follows the span of her life, from her birth in the early 70s to her death in the 2040s, the film is narrated by performers who range in age from nine to sixty-nine. Her story is illustrated with images of people, animals, and landscapes.

“Here is Everything appears as a message from The Future, as narrated by a cat and a rabbit. The two spiritual guides have decided to address humans 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 whole movie.”

In The Fine Arts, Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby mock their own lack of inspiration: a woman confesses that she’s speaking French in the nude because she has no good ideas but admits that her solution is unoriginal. "I hate the fine arts, I am disgusted by the fine arts, because, um, the fine arts are always made with artifice."

Semi-autobiographical, experimental narrative film tells the story of a woman growing up battling mental and emotional disability, but with a powerful drive for greatness. Based on stories from the lives of artists and friends, the work proceeds through a series of short monologues, animations and songs illuminated by images of insects, animals and landscapes.