Essay David Newman , Gallery Director Reification moves sculpture from its passive state as contemplative art toward more precise approximations of the systems which underlie operational reality. The three fabricated steel works by Tony Schraufnagel in this installation of sculpture are manifestly static objects which, in the interpretive encounter between subject and object, manifest their dynamic aspect.
Objects are objecta , problema , problems.
The relation of subject and object is at once a separation entailed by their mutual alterity, and a joining through their mutual equiprimordiality in the situation of encounter. To begin to regard the manifestly static, conspicuous mass of a work of sculpture in this way is to begin to shift the regard to encompass the dynamic as entailed in the engagement of the object in viewer response. Though abstract works, the felt liveliness of form in Schraufnagel's sculpture inevitably engages the viewer's lived experience of embodiedness. Sculpture may renounce the overt illusion of the body but covertly it represents the most intimate conception of the body. . . . Outer appearance is a function both of form and of the materials in which form has its physical manifestation in the work.