Opening Night: Friday 26th September 6-9pm, all welcome
* Please note: The gallery will be open by appointment only on Thursday 2nd October, please email info@2queens.com if you wish to arrange a visit on this day.
Two Queens presents ‘Up Town Again’, a group exhibition featuring the work of six Leicestershire-based artists; Miriam Bean, Evie Cook, Alison Dunne, Oshorenoya David Francis, Jamie Seymour and Francis Underwater.
The exhibition plays on the East Midlands phrase ‘going up town’, an expression loaded with excitement, social rites, and perhaps, teenage rituals and nostalgia. By highlighting the tensions and solidarities that are woven into this multicultural city, the exhibition explores the spatial, temporal, personal and political textures of Leicester. It celebrates local histories, communities, and experiences in response to the increasing alienation of modern life.
Jamie Seymour explores the radical working-class histories of Leicestershire through an intimate, personal lens. Their work around the Luddites demonstrates how the early stages of the industrial revolution began to shape social relations and collective resistance. Their recurrent use of the flea as a motif is threaded through a consideration of these themes in relation to contemporary experiences of class inequality and rootlessness.
Sociability, camaraderie, masculinity and brotherhood mark Oshorenoya David Francis’s large-scale canvas paintings. Inspired by the culture of working men’s clubs, David Francis materialises a cultural hybridity between England and his native Nigeria, showing the porous boundary between ‘local’ and ‘global.’
Miriam Bean’s sound installation further interrogates this boundary by examining the relationship between people and place. What does it mean to be forced to leave home behind and create one elsewhere?
A psychological experience of the city is at the heart of Francis Underwater’s sculptures, moulded from memory, rather than reference. He’s inspired by faces he encounters when wandering the city, from the 158 bus driver to the busker in front of Clocktower, to create fantastical imagined portraits.
For Alison Dunne, a member of Leicester-based all-female punk trio, Boilers, the personal is political. Her sculptures deal with feminist iconography, grief and organs in work that speaks to the contours of the city’s body politic.
And through intricate observational drawings of local architecture, Evie Cook finds beauty in the unnoticed or forgotten details of the buildings around us. Amongst turbulence, uncertainty and change, there is a quiet grounding and solitude to be found within the city walls.
Up Town Again illuminates the faces of numerous ‘Leicesters’. For each artist, the city is both deeply personal and intimate, yet equally collective and multifaceted. They bring together these perspectives to bridge commonalities and differences.
The exhibition has been produced by a new team of Leicester-based curators, Nam Huh, Lyddie Mac, Yusuf Mahmood and Bijal Manoj Daialal, recruited by Two Queens through an open call aimed at finding fresh, local perspectives. The project follows the gallery’s recent transition into a community-owned cooperative, and is one part of Two Queens working to understand what meaningful community co-creation could mean for us. As Leicester’s artists and curators reflect on their city in their own terms, they invite all visitors to reflect on their relationship with the place they inhabit.
This project is made possible by public funding from The National Lottery through Arts Council England.
