“Basic Instinct” is one of 17 separate arrangements of ready-made objects in Kayode Ojo’s “Eden,” the latest brilliant show programmed at 52 Walker by the senior gallery director, Ebony L. Haynes. It comprises a Baxton Studio Jericho Leather Accent Chair in white and chrome; a three-foot-square beveled mirror; four clear plastic boxes, each about six inches high; and a medium-format Graflex camera from the 1970s.

Sitting on the chair at exactly crotch height, its lens pointing out, the camera evokes Sharon Stone’s most famous moment in the movie of the same title. In so doing, the camera also highlights the ambiguous line between exhibitionism and voyeurism, and how wrapped up they both are in status, culture and consumerism. It evokes the strange nostalgia, with its aftertaste of mortality, inherent in any technology that “captures a moment,” especially photography; and it offers an incisive metaphor, if a cold one, for what it means to be human. What are we, after all, but empty boxes looking for ourselves in the mirror?

Elsewhere in the show, Ojo reflects on religion, sexuality and performance. He uses chandeliers, cocktail dresses, an enormous bird cage, dozens of flutes and a family Bible embossed with his name; a pocket watch the size of a wall clock sways gently above the floor. But I kept coming back to the four plastic boxes that hold the Baxton chair above its mirrored base. Offering a slight remove, but a transparent one, at once showy and discreet, they seemed like the key to Ojo’s method.