Abject Nature
Emily Vey Duke & Cooper Battersby
Guest Curator: York Lethbridge
September 8, 2009 – October 8, 2009
Reception and discussion: October 8th, 2009, 6:30pm

Reanimating the Universe with Basic Breathing Exercises, Detail, 2009

Abject Nature combines recent works by Syracuse-based Canadian artist duo Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby. The work investigates the relationship between humans and animals, and our collective strategies to control and understand the natural world.

Duke and Battersby’s current projects tackle complex existential issues using live action and time-lapse video footage, vibrant animations, improvisational song and poetry. Their immersive installation environments also use costumed taxidermy to create elaborate mise-en-scènes for their contemporary fables. Each work takes as its starting point our collective sense of longing for stability and cohesion in a broken world and our weird ways of negotiating with a nature that is now alien to us.

The exhibition at the Union Gallery titled Abject Nature consists of the works, Beauty Plus Pity, Reanimating the Universe with Basic Breathing Exercises, and A Year in the Life of the World.


A Year in the Life of the World, video screen shot

The single-channel video A Year in the Life of the World creates a new map of the earth through the arrangement of approximately 200 video landscapes taken from web cams around the globe. Images from each web cam have been archived for a full year with the final product being a condensed portrait of the world as a multi-faceted but fractured entity.
In Beauty Plus Pity, the artists explore the moral dimensions of our relationship to animals, to children, to parents, and to God, taking for granted that these relationships are dysfunctional from the start. Presented in seven episodes, the video contemplates the abject and often humorous mess that ensues when our self-imposed systems of value and virtue fail.


Beauty Plus Pity, video screen shot

Reanimating the Universe with Basic Breathing Exercises offers a counterpoint as a model for a DIY utopia that treads a delicate balance between empty paradise and man-made purgatory on the perpetual verge of collapse.

Together, these works consider difficult emotional, ethical and existential states through carefully wrought humanist fantasies.


Reanimating the Universe with Basic Breathing Exercises, Detail, 2009

Cooper Battersby and Emily Vey Duke have been working collaboratively since 1994. Their work has been exhibited in North and South America and throughout Europe, including the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery (Toronto), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), The Banff Centre, The Vancouver Art Gallery, YYZ (Toronto), The New York Video Festival, The European Media Arts Festival (Osnabruck), Impakt (Utrecht) and The Images Festival (Toronto). Duke and Battersby both received Masters from the University of Illinois at Chicago and currently teach at Syracuse University in Central New York.

York Lethbridge is an independent curator, writer and artist living in Toronto. He holds a BFA from Queen’s University (2002) and an MA in Art History from York University (2008). Between desk jobs at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Ontario College of Art & Design’s Professional Gallery, Lethbridge has been working on various curatorial projects across Ontario including Connecting with Collections 2: Destinations at Gallery Lambton, Sarnia (until 21 October 2009) and is vice president of Mercer Union – A Centre for Contemporary Art.

Abject Nature, Installation View, 2009