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Two Queens presents an exhibition featuring new work from:
Vanilla Galleries
Bruce Asbestos
Mathew Parkin
Eric Rosoman
LAN Parties were events established in the 90’s by gaming communities, where a number of individuals temporarily come together to play multiplayer video games simultaneously. Connecting to one another by setting up a Local Area Network, these gatherings were often accompanied by large quantities of energy drinks, snacks, pizza. These events were often expected to begin one day and end the next.
Two Queens presents an exhibition of sculptures, structural installation and video exploring social media interaction, offline collaboration and the networks that exist and facilitate practice between artists across regions. The spectre of the domestic LAN Party.
As a collective, the group designed and built a virtual representation of Leicester’s Cultural Quarter and within the world of a first person shooter video game. Whilst playing the game the group hope to explore the cultural potential of a computer game and address the way we inherit and interact within this digital space. In conjunction with this a fort has been constructed that will not only house the game, it will also serve as an archive to the thoughts and tribulations of the collective during the lead up to this exhibition.
Created in an attempt to establish a free digital realm where you can work, collaborate and play, Vanilla Galleries invited a selection of local artist to create work in response to the themes explored by the first person shooter.
Mathew Parkin has developed his work as a response to his first solo show at Supercollider, Blackpool. Referring back to form of digital and physical competitive social space, Parkin positions himself in relationship to Supercollider and the ideas or online identity construction explored in ‘When Passive Aggressive Strategies Fail to Get Results’.
The Social Media Takeaway is Bruce Asbestos’ series of short, whirling and buoyant videos made for YouTube . Tirelessly inventive, the Social Media Takeaway is reflective of his approach to art that is intrinsically multi-media and collaborative, Positioning itself firmly in the public domain Bruces videos use the quick fix, low-brow, throw-away nature of YouTube as site for narrative,performative and discursive work. Each episode features planned events, guests, music and games combined with spontaneous actions, mini lectures and ‘#tweetline’ scripture generated by his twitter followers. For LAN Party, Bruce came to Two Queens and recorded a special bonus episode ‘Stunt’.
Having been involved in the running of The Great Central, an artist led space in Leicester, Eric Rosomon contributes two pieces of work to LAN Party. His Cable Car sculpture, a work made around the time LAN Parties would have been at the peak of their popularity, has laid dormant as an artwork in recent times having been re-apropriated to form The Great Central’s Bar. Three Sketches for a Blimp is a collection of works which refer to a failed, futuristic travel and communication network.
In the second space, the documentary ‘Lord of The Dance Machine’ is screened. Originally aired on BBC3 in 2006 it follows the life of an ordinary teenager from Leicester, as he tries to realise his dream of becoming the best in the world at the growing sport of the arcade dance.
To accompany the work on the opening night we invited sound artist, Dexter Prior to provide a live soundtrack based on a mixture of his own work and specially commissioned tracks that are responses to the ‘in game’ music from the map.