Tightly organized and pieced together like some forensics puzzle, pinned to stark white Styrofoam backgrounds, the fleshy specimens are less about their species and family and more about their iconic recognizability and appeal. A craft punch heart-shape of a woman’s lips can be transformed into a Rosette motif or a lugubrious figure. Antiquity meets Glamour or a Post-Modern Prometheus.
Given the parameters of his practice, dictated by one set of tools and one image, you might see his work as process art, more personal than public. After all, if you dissect an image, then resurrect it, do all the pieces fit? And who would know? Certainly, you can find some wry commentary on Pop society, see some humor in how he uses a baseball bat form to define a woman’s cleavage, and recognize a subtle Christian theme of life, death, and resurrection. But perhaps this is what Adey wants us to see: the value of an artist as inventor of all things imaginable, beautiful, and sublime. Something only he can do. We’re grateful.
David Adey's "I've got a river of life flowing out of me" is at the Luis de Jesus Seminal Projects in San Diego, CA.
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