Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby have been working collaboratively since June 1994. They work in printed matter, installation,curation and criticism, but their primary practice is in art video. Their work has shown at The Whitney Museum, The Walker Center, The Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, The Power Plant, The Musee d’Art Contemporain Montréal, The New York Film Festival, The Toronto International Film Festival, and the International Film Festival of Rotterdam. Their 2019 work You Were an Amazement on the Day You Were Born has shown at Rotterdam, the Berwick Film and Media Festival, the Camden International Film Festival, and Antimatter Film Festival, and The Block Museum. Their recent work Dear Lorde won the Grand Prize at the European Media Arts Festival and showed at Videonale in Bonn Germany. In 2011, they were shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award, Canada’s most prestigious prize for artists under 40. They have received prizes from festivals across the globe and their work is in the libraries at Harvard and Princeton.
A book about their work called The Beauty Is Relentless was published on Coach House Press/MOCCA in 2012. In 2015, a book of Duke’s writing in collaboration with Shary Boyle was published called The Illuminations Project. In 2019 they were grantholders at the International Artists Studio Program in Stockholm, Sweden. They are faculty in art video at Syracuse University.
While at MacDowell, Emily completed a draft of Civil Twilight at the Vernal Equinox. A 20-minute art video about the complexities of interspecies relationships in an age of mass extinction; and the ways these kinships refract through intraspecies relationships. The work will be shown in March at the Museum of Moving Image in New York.
