amborine presents Kenneth Tam's recent work dealing with rituals of masculinity and their capacity to both reinforce and disrupt conventional norms. Rites of passage initiate young men into social codes of adulthood, giving them the chance to test out their mature selves and rehearse normative patterns of behavior. But they also open a space of vulnerability and experimentation, where new patterns can emerge. All of M brings together teenage boys and adult men to explore the meaning of their high school proms. Through impromptu interactions that foster both play and critical dialogue, they take up various masculinities and expectations about becoming grown men. In the end, they flip the script and all dance together–a different kind of prom where they leave behind norms of emotional reserve and distance, instead celebrating affection and kinship without fear of intimacy. Dads give their sons wristwatches as tokens of adulthood–all the responsibility and refinement of being a man, reduced to time-keeping. Tam shows us this image of sensible, restrained masculine luxury through the carnivalesque looking glass of prom: two sculptures of an oversized watch-band and a bezel that simultaneously inflate the conventional myth and puncture it. Latex inner-tubes filled with sand, similar to those used by participants in All of M but significantly larger, also populate the space. Bulky and engorged, they seem to have collapsed under their own weight like exhausted bodies. A triptych of Youtube-style tutorials features an Asian-American actor presenting, among other things, advice on personal fitness, the acquisition of wealth, and improving one’s taste. Each represents a different intensification: of the body, capital, and leisure. The Youtube self-improvement tutorial has become as influential as anything in promulgating norms for the male body and masculinity. Yet by introducing things like hesitation, vulnerability, and doubt into the ostensibly instructional format, Tam finds ways to break the prescriptive circuit. Alternative pathways of interaction open as the monologues come to address one another in a strange new ritual of virtual kinship. So much male-oriented ritual is geared to the making of men–independent, stoic, industrious. Yet these socializing rites open onto a reservoir of possibility, where the script is always in play, never settled–and participants may discover themselves as well as each other in new social configurations, built not on conformity but radical agency. _ Bodies and landscapes have long been the stuff of art, anchoring fantasies both exotic and idealizing. David Alekhuogie's to live & die in LA explores the body as a landscape, unsettling coded representations of urban bodies and revealing their deeply contested territory. Sagging, with its brief history as a style associated with hip hop, gang culture, and black male masculinity, has been politicized and at times criminalized as a pretext for racist persecution. In the Pull-Up series, close-up photographs of the waist area become landscape inspired compositions: bands of color formed by shirt, underwear, and low-slung pants. Initially shot in the studio and variously obfuscated, these images are then taken out into the city, where the flora and famed light of Los Angeles enter the frame. Red berries appear in the foreground of one image, echoing the red athletic shorts at the bottom of the photograph. Shadows trace blurry "drawings" over the rephotographed surface, further distorting our perception. And the contentious saggy pants merge with nature–protective camouflage for the black body within. Alekhuogie’s photographs are ultimately portraits of his hometown of Los Angeles, embodying its deepest contradictions. The L.A. mythologized in the swaggering yet vulnerable rhymes of the late rapper 2Pac (who helped popularize the saggy pant look)–an urban jungle where people fear for their lives, and a place full of dreams and make believe. Here today, gone tomorrow.