Songs of Praise for the Heart Beyond Cure

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 (April 2006) "Rather than offering transcendence or redemption, [the work] suggest[s] that the distinction between desperation and hope is a question of degree and not kind. [Songs of Praise for the Heart Beyond Cure is a] phenomenal and deeply philosophical piece of aesthetic wit and wizardry." --Jon Davies, Canadian Art [Songs of Praise is] "...a paean of love to the natural world and a righteously crass denunciation of the brutish people who make things miserable for everybody else." --Stan Hall, Beyond the Multiplex"