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.