Brad Kahlhamer at the Museum of Contemporary Art

Like the music he makes as half of the alt-country duo National Braid, Kahlhamer's raw, elegant art transcends its multiple influences. Although he has long lived and worked in New York, Kahlhamer was born in Tucson, of Native American parentage. Adopted and raised by a white family, first in Tucson, then rural Wisconsin, Kahlhamer sees with the visionary eye of the outsider, part and yet not part of several cultures at once. "I consider myself to be genetically postmodern," the artist/ musician once said of himself, "that is, adopted and mixed."

After 9/11, Kahlhamer set up a temporary studio at his parents' trailer park home in Mesa, Ariz., and produced many of the ink-and-watercolor paintings in the show "Let's Walk West" at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. In this Southwest setting, Kahlhamer's work pulses with the proximity of the landscapes and people in which it is rooted. Central to the exhibition was a display of 19th-century ledger drawings made by Plains Indians, on loan from Phoenix's Heard Museum. Kahlhamer, who has called the ledger drawings "the original American cartoons chronicling a dark history," is himself a dark cartoonist; his stern-eyed eagles and desultory maidens give off a punk intensity that is part Ralph Steadman, part Egon Schiele, with some of Jean-Michel Basquiat's enfant-terrible scribbling thrown in for good measure. With his urgent, narrative layers, Kahlhamer illustrates the search for identity, both individual and cultural. Recurring images denoting his obsessions and influences tie the work together--guitars and banks of amplifiers dot the narrowing West (mountain landscapes inhabited by eagles, javelinas, prairie dogs and wolves), which is peopled by gun-toting girls in thigh-high black stockings and braids--and he frequently connects elements within a painting with a thin red line, a narrative tool adapted from the ledger drawings.

In Could Kill for Food (2002), an expressive Western oval of washed gray mesa and blue sky is ringed by linked red skulls and braid-wearing prairie dogs. Scribbled along the lines that connect the skulls are instructions such as "Stay on the marked trails" and "Ge by yourself," as well as personal notes such as "Very nervous. Hair falling out" and "Please come back." All 11 individual paintings in the show depict both an internal and an external landscape, culminating in the almost operatic Draw the Flag USA (2004), in which a bloodlike trail spirals out from the center of the page past open-mouthed, floating heads that seem to be in the process of decomposing.

On one wall, a composite block of working materials--photographs, news articles, sketches, ads, postcards and notes--announced Kahlhamer's current preoccupations (more girls, more guns and, improbably, fashion designer Cynthia Rowley). To the right of this diarylike collage, occupying its own large wall, was the result, "Skull Project." This impressive and obsessive series included 164 drawings, on paper or made directly on the wall, of skulls: braided, winged or with crossbones, like an illustrated genealogy of the dead.

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