This documentary takes you inside the studio of Southern California artist David Adey, an award-winning San Diego-based artist and professor who has garnered national recognition for his work. Director Dale Schierholt, best known for his films on acclaimed artist such as Louise Nevelson and Robert Indiana, spent a year with Adey observing the creation of new work and engaging in the intimate conversations with the artist that are the hallmark of his filmmaking style. Adey’s work, while rooted in conceptualism, is not a conceptualism void of a strong aesthetic sense. By developing a set of constraints that guide and define each new work, Adey creates challenging art in which the ascetic and concept work hand in hand, one flowing naturally from the other.
Art by Constraint not only offers the viewer insight into the work of this emerging artist but allows us to reconsider the very nature of contemporary art and just what it means to live a successful life as a working artist.
