In keeping with Roula Partheniou‘s interest in the replica and material play, her series of prints titled Constructions look to the possibilities inherent in printmaking to mimic torn tape, taped corners, masked shapes, layered vellum and stuck paper. The prints appear as impromptu collages, as work in a preparatory state or part way through a process. She employs a strategy familiar to her sculptural practice in her use of reductive allusions to material—inferring tape on paper on paper, layered materials and the shallow space of a collage.

Constructions is a series of screenprints that mimic modest materials that relate to the process of art making and that push and pull between abstract and referential, formal and practical, austere and provisional. At the threshold between abstraction and representation, the compositions can be read as both abstract minimalist compositions but also as still-life representations of paper and tape.

Roula Partheniou received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Guelph in 2001 and currently lives and works in Toronto. Her practice explores how altering or remaking a familiar object can shift our perception and perspective. She has exhibited throughout Canada and internationally, with recent exhibitions at Blackwood Gallery in Mississauga (Canada); The Power Plant in Toronto (Canada); Plug In ICA in Winnipeg (Canada); Museum of Bat Yam (Israel); AHVA Gallery in Vancouver (Canada); Open Studio in Toronto (Canada) and MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts (USA). Her work is held in numerous private collections, in the National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives and in the corporate and institutional collections of Munich Re, Bank of Montreal, TD Bank and The University of Toronto. Forthcoming shows include solo exhibitions at Oakville Galleries in Oakville and The Dunlop Gallery in Regina (Canada); The Gallery Hop Art Environment, Koolhaus (Toronto); and group shows at the Canadian Clay and Glass Museum (Waterloo) and at the Jackman Humanities Building, University of Toronto. She is the subject of a feature article in the current issue of Canadian Art Magazine.