Maine Center for Contemporary Art exhibits Aaron T Stephan's installation Murmur

Aaron T Stephan’s installation Murmur consists of thousands of cast concrete blocks, ranging in size from slightly over life size at the work’s perimeter to vanishingly small as they approach the center of the room. The culmination of a decade-long engagement with the concrete block, both as an abstract form and for the promise it held as an inexpensive construction material with industrial, commercial, and residential uses, Murmur ironizes its material and in the process tackles obvious art historical precedents—a strategy running through a wide swath of Stephan’s work as a whole. In particular, on first glance Murmur is a parody of the Minimalist and post-Minimalist practices of artists who also used cinder blocks including Carl Andre, Robert Grosvenor, and Sol LeWitt, as well as those who created large sculpture fields, Walter de Maria in particular. Its first title was, in fact, Block Field, a nod both to de Maria (e.g., The Lightning Field, 1977) and a groaning