Kenneth Tam (American, born in 1982), All of M, 2019. Single-channel HD video, color, sound, 11 min 50 sec. Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, Robert and Pauline Sears Fund, 2023.53. All images courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, Mexico City.
Taking its inherent theatricality as a jumping off point, Kenneth Tam’s video All of M re-stages the high school prom—often understood as a rite of passage in the transition to adulthood—as a vehicle for examining the affective spaces created by men in groups and how men perform their identities in spaces of social ritual.
Join us for a special screening of Silent Spikes, a work in which artist Kenneth Tam uses movement, theatrical staging, and historical narrative to question existing ideas about the performance of masculinity, and the way those normative performances become mythologized in figures like the cowboy.