David Adey

Named after the larger-than-life character from American folklore, John Henry combines hardcover books, clamps, sawhorses, and steel with logic defying engineering.  In John Henry, David Adey implements the traditional principles used in bridge design to brace two elevated rows of books between the walls of the gallery.  Everything used to guide the structure of this installation, including trapezoidal keystone blocks that push the books upward and thin wooden shims that reciprocate the pressure downward, is visible and marks the “backyard experiment” element of the process. As with Adey’s previous works, in which long hours were spent learning the physics of specific materials and developing a successful method of exercising them, it is always the ideas that carry from piece to piece—not always the material. 

John Henry exemplifies a conceptual process that is informed by a particular set of constraints the artist establishes in a match between opposing forces (success and failure), each time rendering something new and unexpected. “Once it’s under way, I’m not so much making aesthetic decisions on an intuitive level as trying to fulfill an idea,” says Adey. The finished work speaks of futility, pressure, and spectacle, feats of strength, absurdity, faith, poetry, and death.