Waqui Totem USA (Urban Class Mark V)

Brad Kahlhamer’s journey is a physical ongoing pilgrimage. Born of Native descent, Kahlhamer was adopted by German‐American parents and eventually moved from his birthplace Tucson, Arizona to Wisconsin and from there to New York in 1982. Drawing and painting out these schisms between lived experience and a learned knowledge of a past unknown describes Kahlhamer’s search for a utopia or an alternative world where both the desired and the real can sit in permanent dialogue. This “Third Place” as Kahlhamer terms it, becomes an almost spiritual location where the illusory and actuality can reconcile amongst a vibrant and chaotic amalgamation of visual imagery, both remembered and imagined.

The artist´s returning eye to traditions past also pushes forward within his constructed figures that sit sentry‐like alongside his paintings and drawings. Brad Kahlhamer terms these as Spiritual Advisors and as they guard and survey the spaces in which they sit, they are also a reminder of the physical and spiritual journeying within his world. One such recent talisman is a 10ft totem pole, which as you follow its surface from top to bottom it charts the movement from life to its partner – our inevitable death. Transcribed from its original condition out of cardboard and pins into an exact cast in bronze Waqui Totem USA describes a movement through the temporal to the permanent. (Ilsa Colsell)