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LiVE WORK

February 19 - February 19, 2011

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http://michaelzheng.org/LiVEWORK/

1606 12th Avenue #3 San Francisco, CA 94122

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Shaun El C. Leonardo

LiVE WORK presents a one-day performance event with Shaun El C. Leonardo, EJ Hill, and Michael Barrett exploring issues of gender and cultural identity through intense work with the artists’ bodies _______________ Shaun El C. Leonardo blends personal narrative and pop-cultural iconography from his childhood with self-portraiture as a means to convey the complexities of his own masculine identity. For over five years, Self-portrait Remix has manifest an expression of the artist's identity through music. Shaun El C. Leonardo performs to seemingly disparate styles of dance and song that together reflect the totality of his background. Now in the 6th and final iteration of the piece, the artist intends, for the first time, to perform Self-portrait Remix with three separate female counterparts, as a means to question the viewers’ perception of his masculine identity. This performance will be the first of a three-city tour. Shaun received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and currently lives and works in Queens, New York City. He has received numerous residencies and grants including those from Skowhegan, the New York Studio School, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Art Matters, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Leonardo’s work has been presented nationally and internationally. http://www.elcleonardo.com _______________ Chicago-based artist EJ Hill’s work investigates the materiality of the artist’s body and its cultural and social implications. His performances are often minimalist in their forms, yet dense and demanding physically and psychologically, often speaking to his racial and queer identity. For this show, he will do a performance piece entitled Blow. Hill will receive his BFA from Columbia College in Chicago in 2011. He has shown his work nationally including in a recent collaboration in La Pocha Nostra’s Corpo/Ilicito performance at SOMArts, San Francisco. He is the recipient of several awards and residencies including the ACRE Residency Program, the Drawing Room Gallery at the Hopkinson House, the Herman Conaway Scholarship, the David R. Rubin Scholarship, and the Pougialis Fine Art Award. http://ejhill.info _______________ San Francisco-based artist Michael Barrett draws inspiration for his work from his experience as an ex-Marine and a cancer survivor. He often constructs his performances based on the original Marine drills. It is a subjective matter where to draw the line between training and hazing in the military. In most cases, there is a gray area when exactly both sides start and stop passing over into the realm of taboo. Dick Stick plays with this notion and expands upon the idea and absurdity of members belonging to the same organization utilizing training methods and techniques meant for enemy combatants upon one another. In the WikiLeaks era, these performances take on a disturbingly surreal quality. Michael is a current MFA student in San Francisco Art Institute's New Genres Department. http://web.mac.com/creepypeepyroom

EJ Hill

Michael Barrett