Philadelphia, PA - Tiger Strikes Asteroid PHL is pleased announce Homeward, an upcoming exhibition by Melanie Delach, Samantha Dominik, and rod jones ii.

What is home? A place, a person, a feeling? We constantly travel through doors and passages within our minds, entering past and alternate realities. Our consciousness is a home, and our memories are
the rooms within it. Through interdisciplinary practices spanning sculpture, installation, painting, and drawing, these three artists navigate the many mutations of home. Between real, tangible place, and a fictive construct of memory and nostalgia, “home” becomes a mirror for the self.

Ever out of reach, the interior lives of others are mysterious objects of fixation. Melanie Delach’s paintings and drawings attempt to create an architecture for that psychological space so impossible to grasp. These works wrangle with the task of decoding another’s psychology. For Delach, delineations of space within the home serve as a metaphor for the borders and boundaries we set up within our own minds. Tile, plaster, shower curtains, and grout are the building blocks for paintings that feel ever on the edge of ruin, at once familiar and strange.

rod jones ii reconsiders the utility of everyday things. A coat hanger can have multiple identities —
to unplug the toilet, clear the shower drain, open a bottle of wine, act as a sculpture. Through functions both fictional and real, domestic objects become a site for imagining. Our homes carry futures and pasts. Through association and play, the most banal objects can be transformed.

Samantha Dominik’s sculptures and installations embody home as a specter of the past. Through revisiting domestic spaces, the artist re-contextualizes her own experiences and reflects on family trauma. Like curtains with no windows behind them, or phones with no receiving end, Dominik manipulates domestic objects and symbols into forms with no function, imbuing mundane subjects with feelings of uncanny, discomfort, and nostalgia.

Melanie Delach is a painter and mixed media artist from Long Island, New York. Delach lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She received her BFA in Studio Art from Adelphi University in 2017 and an MFA at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2019. Delach’s work has been included in group exhibitions at Anna Zorina Gallery in New York, and at the PAFA Museum and 1401 Germantown hosted by Inliquid in Philadelphia. Delach has curated exhibitions in PAFA’s Tuttleman Gallery and Cherry Street Pier in Philadelphia. Honors include the Fine Arts Venture Fund Grant and the Judith McGregor Caldwell Purchase Prize at PAFA. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

rod jones ii is from Gary, Indiana where the majority of his life revolved around athletics. He always had an appreciation for creativity, whether it be music or drawing cartoon characters, but it wasn’t until he was earning his undergraduate degree that he decided to pursue art as a career. he earned his degree in printmaking from Truman State University in 2016 and his MFA from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2019. He has exhibited his work in St. Louis, MO, Philadelphia, PA, and New York, New York.

Samantha Dominik currently lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Through sculpture and installation, her work deals with memory, relationships, nostalgia, and loss. These associations are drawn from domestic objects, human-like forms, and simulated environments. Her work has been featured in group shows such as Second Nature: The Poetics of Re-Presentation at the Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and PAFA:NOW at N°BA Artspace in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania.