'Strange Objects' published by Marta, edition of 100, 2022

Strange Objects
Published by Marta, Los Angeles, 2022
Designed by Benjamin Critton
48.0 × 10.0 in (Unfolded)
6.0 × 10.0 in (Folded)
Double-sided accordion-folded publication, inkjet, full color
Inkjet-Printed Accordion Publication
Printed in a limited edition of 100 copies

Strange Objects is available from the publisher for $40.00, here.

‘Published on the occasion of the exhibition Two and Two Together (March 11 to April 23rd, 2022), Strange Objects is a limited edition exhibition brochure/artists' book/framable artwork. It features a panorama of Post-It note paintings made specifically for publication. The eight images reproduce hard-edge acrylic paintings on canvas, which remove the third dimension of the artist's sculptural post-it note works.

Designed by Benjamin Critton, the verso features an essay by Partheniou on early childhood development and the mapping of meaning onto form - the artist's first published writing on her own work.’

— Artist Books and Multiples Blog Spot, Dave Dyment

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 associations pile atop our understandings of form.

While the conceptual process of Partheniou’s practice is intimately linked to linguistics, pedagogy, and interdisciplinary research, there are no didactic outcomes. Partheniou illuminates how transferences of meaning skip across the everyday objects of our lives.