Elegant Obsessions, David Adey at the Oceanside Museum of Art

Take a deep dive into this retrospective exhibition at Oceanside Museum of Art. Sacrificial Bodies: The Art of David Adey, is a mid-career retrospective on view through November 1, 2026 at the OMA.

Hi, I’m Bob Pincus, an art critic here in San Diego. I’ve been writing about David Adey’s art for some 20 years. Now, I’ve had a chance to talk about his excellent retrospective at the Oceanside Museum of Art on YouTube. Mark Quint did a wonderful job as curator of the show. My son Matthew, with an assist from his wife, Jennifer van Alstyne, did the deft filming and editing. This channel is possible because of them.

Sacrificial Bodies: The Art of David Adey

I’m standing next to a flock of lambs with halos, neon halos. Hi, this is Art with Bob Pincus and we are at the Oceanside Museum of Art looking at an exhibition by David Adey.

To my left here is a very large, ambitious piece called Hide. It’s a 3D scan of his entire body. It’s a 3D image, but then he flattened it to create the piece. So, presumably you’re looking at an entire image of his entire body, but of course when you look at it, you think, “I don’t see any person in there,’ right?

He’s sort of playing with the idea of the title Hide. It hides his image, but yet it’s transparent about what the information is that he collected. But it doesn’t look anything like a portrait, so it plays with the idea of the appearance versus the reality. The reality being the scanning, but the other reality being, it doesn’t really look like the person that it’s supposed to represent.

This improbable piece, 2,172 Rounds refers to the amount of rounds David Adey shot to get the big block of wood to look like this. You’re basically carving with the gunshots to make the sculpture. This series of pieces he did was kind of an investigation of guns and gun culture. This was part of that, and I ended up writing an essay about it. It’s actually in the exhibition catalog.

It eludes to the violence, but it doesn’t look violent, right? The residue of it. And the other part of that, which I’ll talk about in a minute, is the idea of, he investigated 3D guns, how you could print those with a 3D printer. And that could end up being assembled as a gun legally, which is kind of a scary concept.

So these cedar columns next to me, they’re collectively titled Homeland. And you see colorful plastic pieces inside each of them. Those are actually functional pieces, receivers of AR-15 guns, believe it or not. And one of the things I learned writing about this project that David Adey did, you could print these on a 3D printer and assemble the pieces to make a functional gun. But the eerie thing about it is they look toy-like. So you think, “OK, how could that be functional?” And yet it could be a deadly weapon.

So it sort of seems to come in on the idea of a flock of whatevers that think the same. This is one of several pieces that David Adey’s done with ceramic lambs. Some are large, some are small. Now, clearly these pieces have religious symbolism built into it, right? The lamb, sacrificial lamb. The flock in this piece I always find kind of interesting because you see the cords flowing from the lands right up into the device, which lights up their halos. So you feel like it’s supposed to be luminosity, but it’s not like luminosity spiritual. It’s luminosity mechanical.

And I think the reason you stay interested in an artist’s work is because they have some idea or theme that drives it. But they find different ways of approaching that idea. So his whole thing about that divide between appearance and reality of society, many different things. I think he’s done it in interesting ways.

The other thing that I’ve admired and like is the way that he’ll follow something through so extremely. He’ll think of an idea like, “Can I just suspend a whole column of books?” And then find a way to do it.

The thing that struck me when I talked to him about it was he said, “With certain pieces I like to set up, really almost all my pieces I set up a parameter and then I see if I can do it.” So he had this idea of suspending books like this using basically the age-old technology of suspension bridges that were used by the Romans.

And it’s just so much fun because you look at this thing and think “It’s gonna fall down,” right? But it doesn’t. But it seems like he’s using books because it’s sort of like the old technology that’s being, you know, digital technology replacing books, but this old technology still works and there’s the suspension of it right in front of you.

If you look right here to my right, you see a partial figure, right? And the original image of Mischa Barton with an ad campaign for Bebe, it looks very lifeless. It’s sort of zombie-like. But I think what he’s trying to get at is this idea, you look behind the façade of the celebrity ad, and it’s really not about a person at all. It’s about an image, and it’s sort of the idea that it’s just a façade and nothing else.

When you look close, it’s all taken from fashion magazines, and it’s all fragments of lips. So there’s something really extreme about that idea of how, he’s trying to foreground the idea of how celebrity fashion images personalize people. So by doing that, reducing it to a body part that’s often part of ads, right? Or sometimes even featured as an ad: lips! Lip gloss, lip everything.

And it’s, I think one of the things that I always notice about his work you’ll see something done very elegantly, but within the elegance is also something which is darker or more unsettling, or at least makes you think about what it’s made of.

Thanks for watching. We’re at the Oceanside Museum of Art and we’ve been looking at an exhibition by David Adey and it’s up through November 1.