There’s a chest freezer in artist David Adey’s Point Loma studio, and on an unseasonably hot day in March, all he wanted to do was make sure the freezer stayed as cold as possible.
“If you could close the door behind you,” he asked a reporter visiting his studio, which at the time was probably in the mid-60s with the air-conditioner on full blast.
Inside the freezer was a full-size carcass of a lamb, without the head. As macabre as it sounds, it’s not surprising if you know Adey’s work as an artist.
The animal in the freezer — “a reconstructed lamb composed of meat, sewn back together to resemble its original form” is how he describes it — is a 2026 re-creation of his 2001 piece, “The Lamb,” which Adey, now 53, originally created as a graduate student at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., just outside of Detroit.
“The Lamb” is one of the anchors of “David Adey: Sacrificial Bodies,” a new 70-piece exhibit at Oceanside Museum of Art that looks back at the artist’s career for the past 25 years.
And what a quarter century it’s been.
‘Delighting and unsettling’
Just ask Robert Pincus, the former art critic of The San Diego Union-Tribune who now teaches art history and art writing at the University of San Diego and California State University, Long Beach.
“David Adey’s art has been confounding, delighting and unsettling me for about two decades,” said Pincus, who also collaborates on a YouTube channel, “Art with Bob Pincus,” with his son, Matthew Pincus.
“His medium changes. He has used craft punches to construct and reconstruct images of models from fashion magazines. He has employed a 3-D camera from an Xbox 360 gaming system to take a photograph of every inch of his body, to create a self-portrait that didn’t look at all like him. And he has created a massive sculpture by shooting at a cedar post construction, which is descriptively titled ‘2,127 Rounds.’ All his works challenge the way we normally see things. But they compensate us by creating new sights, new perceptions about the body, about technological tools and about how reality gets made in our 21st century world.”
The words Pincus uses to describe Adey’s work paint a portrait of an artist always in motion, always evolving, always pushing boundaries. The “Sacrificial Bodies” exhibit at Oceanside Museum of Art — curated by Adey’s longtime friend and supporter, gallery owner Mark Quint, in collaboration with Adey himself — is an attempt to capture his artistic throughline for a quarter century and how it’s changed, influenced by time and his evolution as an artist and as a person.
In 25 years, though, what’s never changed is that Adey has always “stayed true to what’s interesting to me.”
‘Position of curiosity’
And what is interesting to Adey?
“Oh gosh, where, where do we start?” he asked. “I think all great art comes from a position of curiosity, right? So, so many things are interesting to me, but inspiration can come from just about anything, even such a simple thing. I think it’s more of a way of looking at the world but with a curiosity in mind.”
To find the inspiration for “Sacrificial Bodies,” Adey and Quint didn’t have to go too far. Instead of creating a show with all new work, they chose to go down the route of a survey exhibition. It’s a look back at his artistic body of work — a melange of media and ideas, creating bridges between the physical and the technological, the earthly and the ethereal.
“The work is the work, so once we decided to do a survey exhibition, as opposed to a solo show with new work, the exhibition pretty much defined itself. Mark and I started looking back through the catalog of everything I’ve done and kind of just getting some ideas of what it could look like altogether. Then, as we started to look at all the work over 26 years, 27 years, that’s when the idea of sacrificial bodies just sort of came up. … It was like, oh, of course, that, that’s the title.”
“I realized when we were talking about the show, and I was looking back through my old work, it seemed like it was pretty evident that there was this thread that was carried through all the works — some more obvious than others — of these actual bodies that are broken apart and, and then there’s some that are just more of a conceptual framework that relates to sacrificial bodies.”
The concept of “bodies” — whole bodies, broken bodies, parts of bodies — figure prominently in Adey’s work. For his 2014 piece “Hide,” he took a three-dimensional scan of his body, flattened it and split it into a diptych. The more-than-life-size work — composed of 75,000 triangles made of laser-cut paper, fluorescent acrylic, pins and PVC foam — was the start of Adey’s fascination with 3-D, and it was done during a time when three-dimensional scanning was not as sophisticated as it is today. For “Hide,” he used a piece of technology meant for something else: the Xbox Kinect camera.
“That’s really going back to an idea that I’ve dealt with for many, many years, which is this relationship between the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional,” Adey said. “In this case, the three-dimensional — my body — becoming two-dimensional. … For years, I’ve been dealing with this back-and-forth between two-dimensional and three-dimensional and moving things in and out of space in that way.”
A former graphic designer, Adey’s primarily a sculptor, but not really in the traditional sense. His work isn’t that of a sculptor who shapes clay, for example. He’s more of a sculptor who “builds things.”
“The fact that I’m a sculptor is definitely influenced by my dad because he was sort of a jack of all trades, you know. He hardly ever hired a contractor or a person to fix anything, even if he probably should have. He would just figure it out. He was really handy and was always building things. He taught me how to use a table saw when I was 12 years old. So I was always building stuff from a very young age, and so that just, I think, lent itself to being a sculptor really easily because I love making things.”
‘Culmination of ideas’
That passion for “making things” led to what he’s calling his “most ambitious” work yet, “Faith Healer,” a bigger-than-life 3-D representation of a futuristic body saddled with cell phones playing videos of ads that promise some sort of healing.
“Faith Healer,” Adey said, “is really the most ambitious piece of my career, the most technically complex, and it’s a piece that actually started over 15 years ago. It started with these little videos that I’ve been collecting for a long time. In fact, I pitched it to a museum, and there was going to be a solo show with that piece — an installation video piece. But it never came to fruition. So it’s been on my mind for a long time. … I never gave up the idea because I thought it was just so interesting and curious to me.”
Over the span of 15 years, Adey collected more than 300 videos, some dating as far as back as the 1960s. Together, they inform “Faith Healer,” a new work that draws on the early Americana concepts of snake-oil salesmen, traveling medicine shows and fire-and-brimstone preachers.
The videos came first, as a germ of idea. The concept of using a 3-D printer to design the body came years later. And that, in essence, is how Adey’s artistic mind works: idea after idea after idea, then something sticks.
“It’s been 15 years since I first started thinking about it, so a lot of new ideas sort of combined with that and that’s kind of how it works. There’s just this sea of ideas that are always out there for the taking.”
For “Faith Healer,” every aspect of the life-size piece is intentional. Even though anatomically correct models were used as the basis for the final “body,” Adey chose to go with a more conceptualized image of the human form.
“I feel like this new piece is like a culmination of ideas that I’ve been dealing with for over 25 years,” he said. “If you think of the lamb piece, it’s like it’s all cut up into pieces and divided and put back together again, but the new piece is the same — it’s all these severed pieces. They don’t really line up, so it’s these chunks of body parts that really capture the commodification of the human body, so that was an intentional choice to make them sort of all severed and in these different chunks.”
‘Artistic pilgrimage’
Adey’s work — intentional or otherwise — has long “intrigued” Quint, who first stumbled upon his work at a private gallery in 2010.
“His obsessive investigations into the human body, aspects of time, advertising, religion, technology and consumerism felt refreshingly out of step with the dominant trends in painting and sculpture at the time — in the best way,” Quint wrote in an essay for a new book that’s being released to accompany the exhibit, “Sacrificial Bodies: The Art of David Adey — 1999-2026,” with chapters written by Quint, Pincus, visual arts writer Lauren Buscemi and art professor G. James Daichendt.
“Working with materials and techniques as varied as lasers, raw meat, guns and 3-D printing, Adey persistently reveals overlooked aspects of the human condition. While the phrase ‘human condition’ can feel overly broad — something that could apply to anyone from a Sunday painter to Picasso — in Adey’s case, it’s grounded in a deeply personal, almost anthropological approach. His work emerges from a kind of artistic pilgrimage: a meticulous examination of what it means to be human in a fragmented, technologized world.”
Quint continued: “I’ve been collecting objects since I was young — everything from coins, stamps and model cars as an adolescent, to art, contemporary furniture, and curiosities as I grew older. In a parallel way, I see Adey as a collector as well. His collection centers on data — primarily data about his own body and its relationship to other folks’ bodies.”
Quint then shifted to “an equally vital part of Adey’s practice: his teaching career. I imagine him as the leader of a constantly evolving, oversized band. Young artists cycle in — some with remarkable chops, most still finding their sound. To assemble a new group of creative individuals year after year and then coax the best arrangement out of each of them, is no small feat.”
That other aspect of Adey’s life — that of a professor — takes up most of his day-to-day existence, actually. For the last 23 years, he has been teaching at Point Loma Nazarene University, a private Christian college that overlooks the Pacific. Before he received his master’s degree from Cranbrook Academy of Art, he attended PLNU.
Anette Ruiz, one of his former students, has nothing but praise for Adey.
“I know that I can speak on behalf of all his students when I say words fall short to describe how grateful we are to have David Adey’s guidance,” Ruiz said. “His mentorship has made a lasting impact on my understanding of the art world, not just in terms of technical skills, but in how to think critically, observe deeply and approach creativity with both courage and care.”
His approach to teaching, Adey said, goes all the way back to his formative days as an artist back in grad school.
“I just had a wonderful grad school experience — an excellent mentor … . You know, you’re trying to find your voice and you’re trying to experiment and she — Heather McGill was her name — would yell at us and say, ‘No more gallery-ready work! That’s not why you’re here.’ And so she would push us to really experiment and really kind of get away from our roots and the things that we were already good at and get away from the tools, the tool kit that we already came in with. She really wanted to challenge us to get away from that. And so I really embrace that.”
Now, 25 years later, Adey is going back to where it all began. One of the first pieces he made where he really got away from how he normally did things? The sewn-up body of a lamb, the 2026 version of which is now lying in state in a freezer at Oceanside Museum of Art.
“David Adey: Sacrificial Bodies”
When: Through Nov. 1
Where: Oceanside Museum of Art, 704 Pier View Way, Oceanside
Admission: $15 adult; $10 seniors 65 and up; free for members, youth 17 and under, college students with I.D., and active military and dependents with I.D.
Phone: 760-435-3720
Online: oma-online.org
An exclusive gallery walk-trhough with David Adey will be held at 1 p.m. June 14. $10 for members and $25 for nonmembers.
