MELINDA STEFFY RUINATION DAY
repetition, nuance, & catastrophe

RECEPTIONS:
Thursday, March 14, 6-9pm
Thursday, April 11, 6-9pm

ARTIST TALK & PERFORMANCE
featuring Bethlehem and Sad Patrick
Sunday, April 14, 3pm

Tiger Strikes Asteroid Philadelphia is pleased to welcome Melinda Steffy Ruination Day. Steffy operates in a complex conceptual space, where music and color and geometric forms and lyrics and story-telling and history all intersect. Melinda Steffy was Invited to the gallery by TSAPhilly member Terri Saulin.

ABOUT RUINATION DAY

April 14: Lincoln was shot. The Titanic hit the iceberg. The Black Sunday dust storm devastated the Midwest. Three major events in American history occurred on the same date, and each are documented in folk and blues songs. Melinda Steffy’s “Ruination Day” series takes four of these songs and re-constructs them as grid-based color patterns. Her geometric abstraction removes the specific contexts of the songs and reveals the architecture of oral history: repetition, nuance, and catastrophe.

On Sunday, April 14, 2019, at 3:00pm Melinda will give a reading of her “Ruination Day Manifesto,” joined by duo Bethlehem and Sad Patrick who will perform the four songs: “Booth Killed Lincoln,” a 19th-century folk ballad; “God Moves on the Water” by Blind Willie Johnson; “The Great Dust Storm” by Woody Guthrie; and “Ruination Day, Part II” by Gillian Welch.