David Adey manipulates books, sawhorses, and Britney Spears in his current art exhibition John Henry at the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library in La Jolla. While manipulating Britney might seem boring and old hat, in his mixed media work, “Britney’s Mental Illness,” (2008) Adey manipulates the pop star’s picture from a People magazine cover image using craft punches in the shapes of hearts, bones, and feet to dissect her face. He then reconstructs her image by suspending the small cutout shapes as one might mount a bug collection with pins onto a ground of Styrofoam. As reconstructed by the artist, Britney’s image becomes eerily unrecognizable.

Detail of "John Henry," 2009 by David Adey.

Variable dimensions; books, sawhorses, clamps,

steel bracing, wood. Photo Credit: Image

courtesy of the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library.

Defacing a book, Adey uses the die-cut process to remove the profile of a hot glue gun from the pages of a 1932 edition of Mary Shelly’s book Frankenstein. Entitled “Post Modern Prometheus” (2010), Shelly’s book is presented open to the die-cut title page with a glue gun, cord attached, inserted neatly into the into the book’s pages. This artwork using a single book is cold and wan when compared to his installation that uses more than 600 hundred books.

In the installation, also entitled “John Henry” (2010), the artist suspends a 40-foot stack of more than 400 books six feet above the ground horizontally. The artist suspends another 18-foot stack of 200 books horizontally three feet off the ground. Each stack is wedged tightly between opposing walls of the Athenaeum’s main gallery using a few wooden wedges that are inserted periodically between books and uses wooden shims inserted every so often into several of the books to maintain the pressure needed to fight gravity. He employs a similar voussoir and keystone engineering system that the ancient Romans used to support their arched aqueducts. The floating stacks are just barely held together by one-inch wide steel bracing and a few wooden clamps with the feet of a few upended sawhorses helping to support the two stacked book spans. The installation also includes a fast-motion video documenting how the artist went about constructing the installation. The Rube Goldberg structure of Adey’s “John Henry” is alarming, fanciful, and remarkable to view.

Also on view at the Athenaeum is Charlie Miller’s exhibition Anything But Rehab consisting of two-dimensional images dealing with drugs and pharmacies that use acrylic paint, collage, and mixed media. Vaguely lurid images of pharmacists and clients obtaining medications are painted onto fields of white doctors’ prescription paper from the 1950s, handwritten with medical dosing information. The artist found the prescription notes in an old pharmacy building in Sherman Heights that he used as his studio.

"Anything But Rehab," 2009 by Charlie Miller.

Size: 31x 40"; mixed media, collage and acrylic

paint on glass. Photo Credit: Image courtesy of

the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library.

The imagery is painted in a mostly affected naïve style using essentially a blue-gray palette. With titles like “Got Meds?” and “Fill Your Order at the Border,” the artist makes attempts to address the current state of expensive pharmaceuticals. Other painting’s such as “Lenny Bruce” (2009) make stabs at commenting on drug abuse. Unfortunately, Miller fails to exploit the most emotional issue in his work; in an age when personal information needs to be so zealously guarded, it is his muscle of displaying the actual prescription notes with prescribing doctor’s information and patient names that is squandered. Miller’s activity of painting diatribes about the inability or ability of obtaining medication onto the prescription documentation castrates the more emotionally charged personal threat of revealing someone’s confidential medical information.