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From This End to That

James Hopkins

September 16th - October 21st, 2005
Opening September 16th, 7-9pm

download press release (PDF)


Images
Invite..........Eureka..........Eureka (Detail)
..........Wishing Well..........Spirit Level Vodka..........Upper Limit

Reviews

The New Yoker September 26 - October 3, 2005

JAMES HOPKINS Sculptures constructed from household items take on laugh-inducing, surreal charm. A row of liquor bottles stand perpendicular to the floor, though the shelf they rest on has tilted a drunken thirty degrees; a splayed umbrella is cut into a spiderweb; a stepladder balances breathlessly on two legs. The pièce de résistance is a wall-mounted bookcase stacked with LPs, appliances, boxes, and books; a few minutes? contemplation reveals the contours of a skull carved into the humdrum collection. Further contemplation also suggests that the show?s humor belies an intense awareness of the existential terror in daily life. www.newyorker.com/goingson/art/#galleries_downtown

ARTFORUM

JAMES HOPKINS The auspicious New York debut by James Hopkins, a London-based artist, offers a whip-smart take on the kind of object-focused quasi-Conceptualism now prevalent at places like Guild & Greyshkul and in Columbia University's MFA program. Here, everyday objects are transformed into impossible versions of themselves (a ladder miraculously balancing on two legs), altogether different objects (an umbrella whose nylon has been sliced into thin strips becomes, when hung near the ceiling, a spider web), or sly commentaries on themselves (eight vodka bottles, with perfectly level contents, are set on a "drunkenly" tilted shelf). The largest and best work arranges the accoutrements of a teenage bedroom?LPs, books, a globe, an acoustic guitar, etc.?on six pine bookshelves. Hopkins has carved into them to varying depths, and from afar the objects resolve into the image of a skull. Titled Shelf Life, 2005, the work is a poetically succinct meditation on longed-for pasts and inevitable futures, the impermanence of objects and their persistence in memory. Brian Sholis www.artforum.com/picks/place=New%20York#picks9594