MCA Denver presented a selection of paintings and works on paper by Brad Kahlhamer, which mix the energy of country western music with Native American symbolism and subversive figuration. His works Rapid City and Prairie Girls blend sex and death, urban and rural, artificial and natural, and dark and light. A newly cast 9 1/​2‑foot tall bronze totem pole is also on view for the first time. His installation projects take on a character that reads as landscape, swirling with atavistic energy — as if a sound accompanies their visual rhythm.

Brad Kahlhamer was born in 1956. He received a BFA from the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh. His work has been exhibited at the Scottsdale Contemporary Art Museum, Arizona; Deitch Projects, New York; and Stuart Shave/​Modern Art, London, among others. He lives and works in New York.