Oceanside Museum of Art will present David Adey: Sacrificial Bodies, the first comprehensive mid-career survey of San Diego artist David Adey, from April 25 – November 1, 2026. The exhibition will trace more than 25 years of a creative practice defined by a persistent exploration of what it means to inhabit a human body in an era of perpetual image culture and accelerating technology.
Curated by Mark Quint of Quint Gallery, the exhibition brings together Adey’s most iconic works alongside rarely seen experiments and new pieces—revealing an artist who continually adopts emerging technologies only to subject them to intense discipline and constraint. Notably, Sacrificial Bodies will debut “Faith Healer,” a new multimedia piece 15 years in the making, described by Adey as the most ambitious of his career.
As a full-time professor of Art & Design at Point Loma Nazarene University with a background in graphic design, Adey’s approach has been described as a hybrid of a mad scientist and engineer. His early work utilized craft punches and laser cutting to dissect advertising and celebrity imagery, while more recent pieces have incorporated 3D scanning, custom electronics, and digitally altered corporeal forms. The results are sculptures that are visually seductive and unsettling, yet intellectually probing, hovering between the material and the metaphysical.
Across decades of work, Adey returns persistently to themes of identity, fragmentation, transcendence, and the body’s dual status as sacred vessel and cultural commodity. His sculptures embody the tension of contemporary life: the pull between intimacy and spectacle, the personal and the universal, technological precision and human vulnerability.
David Adey and OMA’s spring exhibitions will be celebrated at the public Exhibition Celebration on May 2, 2026, from 5pm – 7pm. The reception will include a book release of a 200-page monograph of Adey’s work published by Ulysses Press in association with Quint Gallery and Oceanside Museum of Art.
If you’d like to speak with David Adey or curator Mark Quint in more detail about the show, I’d be happy to coordinate an interview or share additional materials. High-res images are available here (photo credits in folder).
