David Adey

For his first solo exhibition at Seminal Projects, titled I’ve got a river of life flowing out of me, David Adey continues to explore and expand upon an ingenious photo-sculptural strategy that he developed in early 2007 using ordinary craft punches and pins.  Although Adey’s style is complex and difficult to categorize, his work manages to maneuver, with liquid ease, between the sacred and profane, high and low—as well as photography, sculpture, video and installation. The works in this exhibition will include both small and large-scale images appropriated from recent covers of “People” magazine and “Bebe” fashion bus-shelter posters.  In the Project Space, Adey will present a separate sculptural installation (titled I’ve got a river of life flowing out of me) comprised of a dismembered bear created from thousands of drywall screws and shredded, recycled magazine pages. Like the “pin” works, the “screw” piece furthers the idea of creating the ‘whole out of the many’ and asks us to reconsider if the body is truly ‘the sum of its parts.’ 

David Adey’s work traverses between the perverse and the spiritual as it brings to the fore issues of religion, sexuality, and desire, collecting and consuming, and pop-culture and its obsession with celebrity.  Adey invites the viewer to examine Western culture’s fetishization of the flesh via the media’s seemingly endless preoccupation with the “beautiful” bodies of female and male stars and starlets. There is an omnipresent touch of the macabre—a maniacal precision of the serial killer about his work—that makes it all the more prophetic. Adey’s photo-sculptural strategies leave the viewer to ponder who and what will end up defining contemporary culture, historically, and to provoke questions into the very subject and essence of worship today.