Corin Hewitt presents Magic Without Tears (Yellow, Yellow, and Yellow) (2007), a series of three startlingly unnatural, acrid-yellow casts of splintered plywood in the upstairs gallery. Hewitt has transformed material on the verge of obsolescence; reimagining the nature of perception and memory as in previously exhibited works Reign (2005), a bronze cast of his 98-year-old grandfather’s battered office chair, and Legacy (2006), a monumental rainbow made of street sweepings. The ragged plywood panel that served as the inspiration for this piece was one that the artist had watched decay over a period of years against the side of his childhood home in Vermont.

Each panel of Magic Without Tears (Yellow, Yellow, and Yellow) has a surface that is chipped, scarred, bowed, and severely cracked across its middle. This break allows the plywood to balance on the weight of its fissure, sitting improbably upright with a checkmark poise that contradicts its beleaguered surface. This tense posture also allows the viewer to notice the backs of the panels, which are essentially blank, having been cast by Hewitt in relief. The edges of the original plywood rise up against a ground of the material spilled over from the casting process, which the artist has chosen to leave intact. The panels are an interpretation-or impression-of the original object, not straightforward replicas.

Magic Without Tears (Yellow, Yellow, and Yellow) began as a triptych of three virtually identical casts, but Hewitt went on to hand-paint bruises in different stages of the healing process at varying places on each. One bruise conforms to a concavity created by the artist head-butting the panel in its still-pliant state, just as it was pulled from the mold. Another bruise outlines a topographical canyon created by the center fracture. Hewitt then completes and complicates his investigation by laying a photograph of a portion of one of the sculptures on the surface of the middle panel’s bruise. This image is shifted slightly to create an uneasy combination of tromp l’oeil illusionism and a documentation of the object underneath.

While it would be easy to see the head-butt and bruises as symbolic of the artist’s struggle with his past or his practice, the aggressively synthetic material and color of the work distances it from such organic concerns. Magic Without Tears (Yellow, Yellow, and Yellow) locates a very personal psychological relationship within a single, specific object, and connects it to a series of larger formal questions about sculpture. The viewer is confronted with a subtly antagonistic conversation that never completely comes to a close.