Emily Vey Duke & Cooper Battersby

Here Is Everything

15:00 min
2013

 

Here Is Everything presents itself as a message from The Future, as narrated by a cat and a rabbit, spirit guides who explain that they’ve 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.

It is a work that contains specific details about its themes, but sufficiently ambiguous and free of dogma, including religious dogma that, our futuristic visitors explain, is a vestigial leftover from an earlier phase of evolution. And while Death is an ever-present rumination, so are Redemption, Affirmation, and Possibility.

Emily Vey Duke & Cooper Battersby

Cooper Battersby (b. 1971, Penticton BC) and Emily Vey Duke (b. 1972, Halifax NS) have been working collaboratively since 1994. They work in printed matter, critical writing, curation, sculpture and video.Their work has been exhibited in galleries and at festivals in North and South America and throughout Europe, including The Brooklyn Art Museum, The Power Plant, the Walker Center, The Banff Centre, The Vancouver Art Gallery, The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Hallwalls, The New York Video Festival, The European Media Arts Festival, Impakt, and The Images Festival. In 2011, they were Spotlight Artists at the Rotterdam International Film Festival and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Their video work has won prizes nationally and internationally, and has been broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Bravo. It has been collected by many university libraries, including those at Harvard and Princeton. The videos are distributed in Europe by Argos, in the US by Video Data Bank, and in Canada by V-Tape and Video Out.

Duke and Battersby teach at Syracuse University. They split their time between Lafayette, NY and Beach Meadows, Nova Scotia.