I Heart

The second (third) post of I Heart works, including projects by Ross Sinclair, Yoko Ono, David Shrigley, Jeremy Deller,  Noah Lyons, Roula Partheniou & I, and Mark Pawson, who fashioned an entire practice (and lifestyle) out of celebrating the things he loved. 

Roula Partheniou

Happy Birthday to Roula Partheniou!!

[materials: acrylic on wood, drill bit, aluminum]

Roula Partheniou | Party All the Time

Roula Partheniou

Party All the Time

acrylic on wood, 2026

16 x 11.3 x 11.3 cm

Unique work

I think of works in this series (ephemeral party favours such as balloons, hats, noisemakers, etc., rendered in mdf) as a form of having your cake and eating it too. 

This hand-painted turned wooden party hat was made for the annual Sweetest Little Thing auction and gala, which takes place in Sackville every Valentine’s Day. Artists are invited to donate small works which are auctioned off to support the programming of both venues. 

Bidding closes tonight at www.sweetestlittlething.ca.

Happy Birthday to Paul Van Kooy

 

Happy Birthday to Paul Van Kooy, of Paul+Wendy Projects. 

A is For Apple

My favorite review, ever: 

"At sixteen, shaking in my boots, I showed Roula Partheniou and Dave Dyment my Google Street View books. To be clear, I had unknowingly made a worse copy of Jon Rafman’s photo series. I tried to smile as they observed. What are you supposed to do with your face when someone is analyzing your art?

Dave started: “They’re amusing, but you need a more specific focus.” He flipped to a page where I had laid out, side by side, a photo of a beautifully scruffy dog and a man I thought resembled the animal. “This is what you need more of,” he said. “Maybe you could focus on people who look like dogs.”

Roula elbowed him. She must have sensed my disappointment. Shut the fuck up, her body language was saying. At that moment, I saw her as a protective mother figure. Flattering myself that I could be some kind of demented version of their child.

In their first collaborative show at MKG127 (everyone always thinks I’m talking about Machine Gun Kelly), the two long-time partners take on the role of Montessori heads. Roula’s stripping down and reassembling of everyday objects is paired with Dave’s obsession with research and visual connections. The Swiss-hippie teachers are ready to re-educate the postmodern child on the simple pleasures of life.

Dave has started seeing faces in rocks and trees, as the cavemen once did. Roula frames the natural wonders with her wood-cutting mastery. I wonder if this is their child, the one I wanted to be so badly back in 2017.”

- torontoartboggart

 

A is For Apple

Tomorrow is the last day to see A IS FOR APPLE, a collaborative exhibition made with Roula Partheniou, about pedagogy, pareidolia and pattern recognition. The show features numerous editioned work, which I’ll post over the coming days & weeks. Press release below. 

A IS FOR APPLE

Dave Dyment & Roula Partheniou

September 13 – October 11, 2025

“We see shapes in context, and our reactions to them depend in large part on that context. If this were an illustration for a story about the ocean, we could variously read the red triangle as the sail of a sailboat, a shark’s fin, a volcanic island rising from the sea, a “red nun” buoy, or the bow of a sinking ship. We feel very differently about the triangle if we see it as a sailboat than we do if we see it as a shark’s fin.”

– Molly Bang, Picture This

A IS FOR APPLE, the first collaborative exhibition by gallery artists Dave Dyment and Roula Partheniou, explores play, perception, pattern recognition, and cognitive geometry, from early childhood development back to early civilization.

Loosely modelled after a Montessori classroom, the exhibition features works that take the form of games, puzzles, books, building blocks, flashcards, and other teaching aids. Elemental units such as numbers, letters, and basic shapes are mobilized as conceptual tools to parse how patterns both structure our thinking and emerge from it.

Visit www.mkg127.com for more information. 

Special thanks to Annie Koyama. 

Dave Dyment & Roula Partheniou | 1 Pound

Dave Dyment & Roula Partheniou

1 Pound


Sackville, Canada: Self-published, 2025

[24] pp., 14 x 19 x 4 cm., boxed loose leaves

Edition of five signed and numbered copies

"A pound of strawberries equally divisible by twenty-three was assembled and photographed, then UV printed on card-stock the same weight as each strawberry.”

In other words, rather than purchase and photograph a pound of strawberries (like the Hans-Peter Feldmann work it references) we had to reverse engineer one. We bought several pounds from the farmer’s market, weighed each on a tiny scale and documented only the strawberries that weighed 0.7 ounces (see below). 

Each photograph of a 0.7 ounce strawberry is printed on a card that also weighs 0.7 ounces. So the collection (minus the box and title card) weighs precisely one pound. 

The photographs are printed as children’s flashcards, and the work is part of the exhibition A IS FOR APPLE, which takes the format of a classroom to explore pedagogy, pattern recognition, and pareidolia.

Originally we were collecting vintage children’s flashcards from charity shops, in the hopes of amassing an abstract pound of strawberries (below, bottom) but then it occurred to us that the printing process could reflect the conceptual conceit of the project. 




Housed in a handmade box, 1 Pound is available from MKG127, in Toronto. I think one or two copies remain. 

Forest for the Trees

The half-ass nature of posting recently is a result of Roula and I collaborating on an exhibition that opens this weekend at MKG127 in Toronto. 

Hans-Peter Feldmann looms large over the show. There is a deliberate re-make of one of his works, a completely inadvertent remake of another, and three works involving found photography.  The exhibition also includes three books, though two of them are represented as videos.

The found photography of the third video, though, owes more to a Meg Cranston work that I once exhibited when I worked at Mercer Union. She presented vernacular photography as a slide show, with bean bag chairs. The hundred or so dog portraits projected in the darkened space were not taken by her, or by a professional photographer, but by staff at a local shelter with neither the time, nor the training or equipment to perfect their pictures. 

But they did have the knowledge that a particular type of photograph helped the dog’s chances of being adopted. Pictures of dogs in cages didn’t go over well. Growling or looking angry, obviously was to be avoided. Or mangey. Give the dog a toy to play with and he’s more likely to become someone’s pet, they learned. Place her in front of a tree or some flowers and the dog’s chances increase, also. 

So the show became a loving testament to amateur photography, with serious life or death consequences. The photographs were only a month old - as I callously told the Globe and Mail at the time - but many of the dogs pictured were probably already dead. 

Our video features five hundred or so online images collected since 2012, accompanied by a 3000 word text about pareidolia. 

It’s life and death only in historical, evolutionary terms. As Carl Sagan explained “Those infants who a million years ago were unable to recognize a face smiled back less, were less likely to win the hearts of their parents, and less likely to prosper.”

The video is called Forest For the Trees and is the third of the three USB sticks pictured above. The exhibition is title A IS FOR APPLE, and runs from September 13th to October 11th. For more information, visit the MKG127 website, here. 

Wendy Gomoll

Happy Birthday to Wendy Gomoll, of Paul+Wendy Projects.