Aaron T Stephan
With his works, Aaron T Stephan responds to a conversation with Duchamp, Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg, and Warhol, among other artists, where the mundane and pedestrian are tested against the high mindedness of Modernism. For example, The Possible Inevitable (2013) appropriates the form of the Uffizi Wrestlers, a Roman copy of a Greek sculpture that no longer exists. The Roman version has been copied multiple times throughout the past 500 years and can be found in institutions of high culture and popular culture. A copy of a copy, The Possible Inevitable speaks to the complex and varied history of Western art, questioning what is carried forward and what is left behind. Similarly, in 2013 at deCordova Sculpture Park, Stephan recreated iconic twentieth-century sculptures by Vladimir Tatlin, Donald Judd, and Robert Smithson in the everyday materials of the park’s architecture and facilities–railings, trash barrels, and spilled wall paint respectively. Stephan notes: “In my installation, I focus on the use of sculpture as an idealized or utopian space that is expressed through form. I have appropriated a group of iconic twentieth-century sculptures and contextualized them in the site. It could be said that the alleged autonomy of the borrowed form is corrupted by …
With his works, Aaron T Stephan responds to a conversation with Duchamp, Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg, and Warhol, among other artists, where the mundane and pedestrian are tested against the high mindedness of Modernism. For example, The Possible Inevitable (2013) appropriates the form of the Uffizi Wrestlers, a Roman copy of a Greek sculpture that no longer exists. The Roman version has been copied multiple times throughout the past 500 years and can be found in institutions of high culture and popular culture. A copy of a copy, The Possible Inevitable speaks to the complex and varied history of Western art, questioning what is carried forward and what is left behind. Similarly, in 2013 at deCordova Sculpture Park, Stephan recreated iconic twentieth-century sculptures by Vladimir Tatlin, Donald Judd, and Robert Smithson in the everyday materials of the park’s architecture and facilities–railings, trash barrels, and spilled wall paint respectively. Stephan notes: “In my installation, I focus on the use of sculpture as an idealized or utopian space that is expressed through form. I have appropriated a group of iconic twentieth-century sculptures and contextualized them in the site. It could be said that the alleged autonomy of the borrowed form is corrupted by the reality of an everyday context. Hopefully these new works will explore the possibility of utopian form that stands within its environment rather than outside of it.”
Stephan has had solo exhibitions at the Portland Art Museum, DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, and University of Maine Museum of Art in Bangor. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Portland’s Institute of Contemporary Art, Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport, Weitz Center at Carlton College in Northfield, and Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland. He has been an artist in residence at Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and Yaddo in Saratoga Springs.
Courtesy of Samsøn