MARCH: Although you’ve been performing in New York for several years, this is your first solo exhibition. People may be surprised to learn that painting and sculpture are integral to your work. How do you see these elements functioning as part of a larger project?

Shaun El C. Leonardo: My work in its entirety is self-portraiture. I place myself within the masculine guises that I feel have informed/developed who I think I am today. The work is an uncomfortable investigation of my own identity filtered through vulnerabilities I hold based on racial and masculine representations. The performances are a cathartic, explosive way to personify this iconography, while the paintings and drawings are a more strategic, quiet expression.

MARCH: Your characters embody an over-the-top masculinity, but are ultimately failures. What is your interest in the impotent hero?

El C.: I believe something in human nature wishes for the character of super-heroism - the ability to rise above, defend the defenseless. At the very core of the self-portraiture is my desire to be the protector and savior. However, the ideals surrounding the creation of heroism set one up for failure. My work relates the desperation of chasing those ideals and the inevitability of falling short. The work is not a negation of the idea of the hero. Rather the self-portraits, at once, illustrate a critique of and longing for that idea.

MARCH: We’ve worried for your safety during performances on more than one occasion. Why is physical aggression and exhaustion so important in all of your work?

El C.: I have an incessant need to test myself—to actually discover what my physical and mental limitations are, in the face of projecting myself as the hyper-masculine being. The other easy answer is: no one else can pull it off.