Mark Grotjahn

For those seeking a certain intimacy in the evidence of imperfection, the smallest Mark Grotjahn show of the year will disappoint. As in the artist’s 1997 to 2008 “Butterfly” series, the two new bronze sculptures on view at South Willard derive depth from distance, from surfaces made trenchant by implied restraint. Cast from repurposed cardboard boxes that once packaged DeWalt power tools, the blocky heads with bewildered-looking incised mouths and tubular noses are part of a family of work that was at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas earlier this year. Installed here on pedestals at roughly eye level, each piece has the bulk of an industrial washing machine; together the pair weighs nearly half a ton.

Untitled (Top and Interior Gates, DeWalt Mask M33.c) and Untitled (Top and Exterior Gates, DeWalt Mask M33.e), both 2014, retain the practical byproducts of the foundry process usually removed during polishing: a cage of sprues and vents for molten metal (exterior on one mask and interior on the other) and bent nails to keep the silica sand casing from slipping. Instead of patina or paint, or even a spit-shine, the sides are mottled with traces of the mold itself, wormed with the creases of the burnt-out box. Leaving the finish alone is effort, of course, and besides the large masks were actually cast in pieces and welded together, a lot of heat to approximate accident.