Visual Art: Brad Kahlhamer exhibit at the MCA

The Brad Kahlhamer exhibit recently opened at the MCA Denver, featuring two mixed media-pieces from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary in Vienna and a totem-pole sculpture from the Logan Collection. Kahlhamer combines rock n’roll with landscape, spirituality with a raw sexuality, gritty realism with dreaming-life. Recurring motifs of provocatively clothed women (though never quite nude), death and American identity create a combined imagistic effect of vertigo. Form seems to occur two ways simultaneously for Kahlhamer: kaleidoscopically and vertically. The fragmentary (though centered) display of drawings and paintings collides with Kahlhamer’s persistent use of the totem pole (also in miniature in the mixed-media projects). The bodiliness of these pieces (the sex, decay, implication of illness, etc…) perhaps adds to this, the interpretation of his work as something like an alimentary tract. The alimentary tract is, of course, essentially a void running through the human body through part of which respiration occurs as well as the processes of appropriation and excretion (life at it’s most basic). But the dusty, sultry figures lounging, howling and dancing in Kahlhamer’s work are emaciated (skeletal or very thin), the landscape though beautiful is barren, mouths are often hanging open: these pieces are hungry, movement spirals around an insatiable emptiness. And though large in scale that the viewer is compelled to step back and absorb the combined effect of the various parts, Kahlhamer also uses the form of palimpsest: clips, phrases, street signs, directions, tags, tattoos written over and under-written throughout the more dramatic images.

Brad Kahlhamer is on-view at the MCA Denver, 1485 Delgany St., through September 21st.

For more info visit www.mcartdenver.org