Shaun Leonardo is one of the artists in ‘Between History and the Body’, 8th Floor Gallery New York, from July 9 until October 16, 2015.
Gatti 2, 2011.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Azua, The Fall.
Leonardo’s work negotiates societal expectations of masculinity; achievement; collective identity; and the experience of failure.
Patrick D. Wilson
Mike Tyson, 2012.
Battle Performance (3hrs), 2012 (Photo Bob Martus)
Shaun Leonardo uses his body to communicate and portray imagery, in this case, hyper-masculine images of physicality – at the expense of his own physical comfort. The function of the male body has long been a signifier of self-worth. The body affirms and legitimizes his feeling of control and agency over his environment. In this sense Shaun “El C.” Leonardo is performing two very distinct actions at once. On the one hand, he uses performance as a venue for discussion of how men have internalized culture’s preconceived notions of how men should act and appear. And on the other hand, his performances call attention to how these expectations are not only strange, but also not applicable to the rest of men at large. We are not all super heroes, that these spectacles of masculinity contain elements of absurdity and arbitrariness. Leonardo’s work calls our attention to these spectacles not for their immediate content but rather as symbols of our cultural acceptance of an arbitrary and potentially irrational masculine norm.
Dave Sinaguglia (on website artist)
Even more radical in the context of [sport], however, is the idea of relating masculinity to performance, for the very notion of performance strips [sport] of its spontaneity, its essential naturalness, and subjects a chance series of athletic events, governed by instinctual, precognitive behavior, to the analytical potential of scripting – quite literally, to the process of representation.
Christopher Bedford (on website artist)
About the exhibition:
Between History and the Body is an exhibition that looks closely at the ways in which cultural identity is defined, how it is used as a force of exclusion, and how it works as a unifying and transformative energy among artists of diverse cultural backgrounds.
Between History and the Body features artists Elia Alba, Firelei Baez, Nick Cave, Jean-Ulrick Désert, Nicolás Dumit Estévez, Brendan Fernandes, Jeffrey Gibson, Shaun Leonardo, Ana Mendieta, Paul Anthony Smith, Chungpo Tsering and Saya Woolfalk, who work across a variety of media including sculpture, painting, photography, performance and video. Together, these artists generate dialogue on cultural identity and history through representation of the body as an active force in ritual, both historic and imagined, and as an agent in the production of relics that communicate narratives of the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa.
(Press Release)