Brad Kahlhamer

Super Catcher, The Sun Weave

Influenced by New York’s underground punk scene, Native artist Brad Kahlhamer uses industrial wire and pliers to create his Super Catchers. These works riff on the sinew and leather-built dreamcatchers that inspired them. Originally made by Lakota and Ojibwe people, dreamcatchers were created as a protective charm to hang above infants and ward off harm while they sleep. Over the course of the twentieth century, dreamcatchers transformed from powerful spiritual objects to tourist collectibles, and factory-made replicas distanced from their cultural origins. Kahlhamer’s Super Catchers respond to this history and reclaim the symbol, endowing it with a new, punk energy. In the artist’s words, his Super Catchers began with the idea “of taking every dreamcatcher in the United States, whether it’s on a pick-up truck or in a single-wide trailer, somebody’s bicycle or baby crib, and weaving them all together in a cosmos, a universe of industrial wire. The spiritual rebar for an enriched dream reactor.”