Duke & Battersby
You Were an Amazement on the Day You Were Born

From January 28 to March 27, 2021

You Were an Amazement on the Day You Were Born follows a fictional woman named Lenore from her birth in the 1970’s to her death in the 2040’s. Narrated in the second person by a diverse range of performers, this work makes a request for empathetic contemplation. Lenore is imperfect, unimpressive, and in some cases, cruel to others; but she is also queer, neurodivergent, rightly angry and earnest. Her dark comical life stories of love, sex, loss, and death are written with a naked honesty that somehow disarm judgement, while a background of various fauna close-ups appropriately trigger feelings of love and wonder — either for their captivating grotesqueness or their irresistible cuteness.

You Were an Amazement on the Day You Were Born (2019) — 33 minutes

Canadian artist duo Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby have been collaboratively creating video works and installations since 1994 and have exhibited, screened and broadcasted their work throughout the world including at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery (Toronto, 2009), the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2010), the Rochester Contemporary Art Center (New York, 2009), the UMKC Gallery of Art (Kansas City, 2009), the International Film Festival Rotterdam (2011), the Ann Arbor Experimental Film and Video Festival (2013), and the ARGOS centre for audiovisual arts (Brussels, 2018). The Beauty is Relentless: a Book about the Short Movies of Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby, published in 2012 by Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art and Pleasure Dome (Toronto) brought together the writing of 11 writers. In 2010 they were shortlisted for Canada’s Sobey Art Award and in 2016 they were featured in Images Festival Canadian Artist Spotlight (Toronto).