Aaron T Stephan is an artist living and working in Portland, Maine. His work presents a wry look at the world around him – focusing on complex web of information carried by everyday materials and objects.

Stephan’s exhibition Untitled Monuments arises from the complexities of public monuments and their ability to reproduce deeper structural problems.  This has been seen during the past year not only in the toppling of long-standing monuments, but also ways in which the pandemic aggravated deeper cultural divides.

Cyanotypes are the original medium for making blueprints, an object that represent the span between a plan and an actuality. Monuments are also physical representations of a set of ideals in the same way that blueprints stand as an idealized design of a real object. 

In Untitled Monuments, the translation of the monument to paper suggests a speculative process of questioning that is more flexible, less permanent, and more grounded in personal experience than the top-down narratives received from systems of authority.

Stephan’s large sculpture, Simple Twist of Fate, shows a singular gestural movement that changes the entire building structure of a unit, exploring simple methods of change and influence.