Roula Partheniou: Strange Objects

Within generative sets of potential misrecognitions, Canadian artist and sculptor Roula Partheniou offers alternative orientations to familiar forms. There is a startling exactitude injected into her sculptures, which mirror and flip proverbial outlines of chalkboards, Post-Its®, snack packaging, erasers. What might the habitual demand of function obscure from view, or blur in our perceptions of these surfaces and their fluctuating meanings? The works hide in plain sight, enacting a hyper(in)visibility which requests active stances of deduction and offers non-linear discoveries that evolve through time. Partheniou’s research and material reconnaissance engages a vocabulary of replication which stutters across her process—but not in reference to static originals. Rather, she attends to the learned reflections of objects housed in our embodied understandings of language, signification, and meaning-production. We come to know objects in and with time, as the detritus of everyday associati