James Hopkins
Acid Rain
2006
193 x 193 centimeters
Unique
'Acid Rain' is a standard garden greenhouse whose mirrored walls turn it into a kaleidoscopic room. The viewer's visual path is reflected into an enigmatic effect of infinity and repetition. The work is a humorous fusion of the familiar image of a green house and the disturbing experience of side-show theatrics, between climate control concerns and visual cloning.
James Hopkins
Echo
2006
19 x 70 centimeters
Unique
'Echo' conflates the receptions of language and visual perception: the letters "ECHO", displayed on a shelf, are reflected in a mirror. Since all the letters are symmetrical, their reflection also reads "ECHO", delivering a synchronic definition of the word.
James Hopkins
Focal Lenght
2006
145 x 100 centimeters
Unique
Focal Length is a spirit bottle set sideways on a wooden tripod, looking like an early type of viewing apparatus. For who looks throught the neck of the bottle, a concealed series of mirrors set within it produce a kaleidoscopic view of the world outside and a strong feeling of drunkenness, as a take on Oscar WILDE's witticism about 'lying in the gutter yet looking at the stars'.
James Hopkins
Kicks in the park
2006
110 x 150 centimeters
Unique
'Kicks in the Park' is a park bench held in fragile equilibrium by beer bottles acting as counter weight. Between triviality and precision, this work references the mischievous and destructive time spent by teenagers getting drunk in the park while also acknowledging balance as one of the fundamental concerns in the tradition of sculpture, here achieved through bottles of alcohol.
James Hopkins
Kyle, Stan, Cartman and Kenny
2006
102 x 150 centimeters
Unique
'Kyle, Kenny, Stan and Cartman' applies anamorphosis to popular contemporary imagery: apparently a random composition of plastic shapes and colours, the sculpture, seen from a certain angle, turns out to be a representation of the familiar cartoon characters from the satirical animation South Park – ironic and familiar personification of a wasted youth.
James Hopkins
Sliding the Scale
2006
90 x 140 centimeters
Unique
The anamorphic sculpture Sliding the Scale shows the artit's interest in cartoon culture. The work is a grand piano which has been distorted in order to visually encapsulate the sound and movement associated with music, as in Disney's classic Fantasia, in which inanimate objects are given life and personality.
James Hopkins
Wasted Youth
2006
250 x 161.6 centimeters
Unique
'Wasted Youth' consists of a set of shelves filled with objects and items associated with the pleasures and excesses of adolescence. In the way the objects are assembled, certain of which having been cut into or peeled back, and through the positive and negative space of perspective, appears the image of an oversized skull. As in Hans HOLBEIN the Younger's famous canvas The Ambassadors (1533), James HOPKINS brings together two pictorial traditions from the Renaissance: on the one hand the anamorphosis – where an image is hidden in a distorted perspective; on the other hand the vanities – a still life representing objects that symbolise the fragility and the brevity of life, inviting the viewer to meditate on the futility of human pleasures when death is a certain end.
