|
James Hopkins
123
James Hopkins
123
2014
250 x
200 x 120 cm
Stainless steel and paint
James Hopkins Studio presents the launch of
123, a major new sculpture commission unveiled at
Florentinum, Prague, Czech Republic.
The
majority of Hopkins’ practice is concerned with the role of
judgment in connection to the process of vision. He optically
adapts the familiar in order to create sculptural
interventions, which momentarily knock the viewer’s perception
off-kilter.
His most
recent sculpture ‘123’, is based on ascending and
descending numbers, which play on the notion of fixing
illusions through the isolation of the observer’s viewpoint.
The numerals have been stretched, sculpted and carved in
opposing directions, switching meaning when looked at from
different angles. This permanent free-standing sculpture is a
continuation of his interest in the ambiguity of the image and
other scenarios which deceive the eye. The inherent visual
trickery of ‘123’ confirms the visual puzzle and
optical conundrum as Hopkins primary field of
operation.
‘I
consider perspective and the rendering of space in art to be
the crux of artistic techniques and think that the most
important link in the armoury of illusionistic art is the
trick of perspective. I am most interested in how certain
sculptures are capable of simultaneously representing several
different visual interpretations. I find it most intriguing
how our visual perception of such sculptures can switch
between two or more alternatives and what the subsequent
effect of perceiving a changing space of representation has
upon our senses. When looking at my sculptures the viewer is
made aware that each viewpoint holds something entirely
different from the next. This confirms that no one viewpoint
when looking at sculpture can be any more reliable than the
next’.
James
Hopkins
‘Hopkins's sophisticated visual illusions are
engaging, but his best works also hint at the epistemological
uprooting that follows from the discovery that sight, our most
relied-upon sense in the gallery, can be untrustworthy. Few
contemporary artworks consciously remind us of this fact;
Hopkins links it to an examination of his objects' intrinsic
characteristics, and, occasionally, to a meditation on the
emotional fallout of this and other fundamental
instabilities’.
Brian
Sholis, Artforum
‘His
highly focused practice has consistently addressed the
perceptual aspects of the relationship between artwork and
viewer. Producing objects, installations and public works that
in their level of fabrication approximate processes of
high-end mass production, Hopkins fuses the surface logic of
the commodity with that of a fairground mise-en-scene.
Arrangements of elements are carefully constructed to create
slippages in perception, wherein the viewer’s confidence in
what is seen shifts as their physical location in relation to
the work changes. This “trickery” is employed in a manner that
reflects on philosophical and psychological traditions related
to the connectivity between vision, language and
thought’.
Richard
Birkett, Artists Space, New York
‘These variations on an anamorphic theme
interpellate the viewer, and perhaps generate the same wonder
and perplexity that the artist describes on first encountering
the potter’s wheel. Shapes continually change, bounding and
defining a central point in what Hopkins calls an ‘elastic
band reality’.
Darian Leader
Links:
| 
