AIR SONG

In his first European solo exhibition with Stems Gallery, Tyrrell Winston explores the embedded history of discarded objects and Air Songs; visually melodic sculptures and paintings that are pieced together while roaming the streets of major metropolitan areas for hours at a time.

Air Song puts Winston’s fascination with the ideas surrounding high and low elements of culture on center stage — taking objects perceived to be detritus and elevating them to a level that is visually unavoidable. Trash heaps, cigarette piles, broken basketball nets (which are replaced with new nets), de ated basket-balls and street signs are Winston’s materials of choice.

Winston’s work draws parallels in the absurdity between symbolism of contrasting objects. Cigarette and basketball related works are the focal points of the exhibition, the fact that air informs both objects is the link between them.

The in ation of a basketball activates its primordial purpose, breathes this object of play, of joy and move-ment, into life. Air made deliciously toxic by the re of tobacco brings a darker kind of joy, one connected to self-destruction, consumption, death. Things meant for destruction always tell such curious tales, and it is these things and their tales that nd beguiling articulation in Winston’s (work).

Interview with Tyrrell Winston by John Martin Tilley for Of ce Magazine

While every found object has a story that Winston is not a part of, it’s the power of the objects together that Winston uses to beckon the viewer closer, inviting them to get lost in the lines of cigarettes and quilts of basketball nets.