Sean Winfrey’s art exhibit, “Lines Apart,” honors people he has lost.
“The overall theme, I guess, would seem to be healing,” says Winfrey, 31. “With kind of the emphasis on mental health and grief.”
His big brother, the late John Winfrey, was the initial inspiration for the show. “A few years ago, my brother committed suicide. He was bipolar like me. The art just came about by me just trying to fix myself a little bit and reflect on some of the good times I’ve had with him.
“And it kind of expanded. For a while, I was losing people every other year of my life. So, it was a way for me to eternally heal.”
Winfrey is an instructor in the Cloud901 team learning lab at Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library, where he mentors young people in filmmaking, painting, and digital art. He’s also a member of the Memphis Flyer’s 20 < 30 Class of 2020.
“Lines Apart,” which will be on view through August 31st at the library, opened with a reception on July 29th.
The works in the show aren’t typical of Winfrey’s art. “I’m usually making art that is reactive in other ways — making people laugh and music videos and things like that. This is more of an internal struggle I’m trying to push out.”
“Matter” was the first painting Winfrey did for the exhibit. “It’s an abstract piece. And I continued doing this abstract method until it kind of formed into a concrete idea and concept. It’s black-and-white lines. I feel like my fascination with it came whenever I put the epoxy on and the lines started to come alive and feel like they’re moving a little bit.”
He then began to “make more three-dimensional spaces with just these black-and-white lines. I wanted to create motion with a still image. Whenever I was creating a lot of these images, I was doing a lot of meditation. It was really just an attempt to push myself out of a dark place. I suffer from bipolar and I need to do very tedious things in order to fight through depression and fight through similar things my brother was going through.
“I think there’s a big misconception with people who commit suicide. My brother really did want to live. He just had a bad day and he didn’t have the resources to pull himself out.”
Making the paintings was therapeutic. “It gave me a source of healing. But I feel like this is relatable to anybody that’s experiencing grief.”
The exhibit features 20 paintings. “I was trying to do two paintings a week and just get lost in the process. I dropped all of my other gigs and things just to kind of focus on this. It took me nine months to finish this series.”
While he was working on the paintings, one of the teenagers he mentors at the library, Jonathan Killingsworth, looked at Winfrey’s work. “He came up and said, ‘Oh, this is really great.’ Two weeks later, he passed away from a very senseless gun crime. He got shot for a small sack of weed.”
Winfrey began putting color in the paintings of people “to signify them being alive.”
Then, he says, “I just kept diving deeper. When I was in my early 20s, I lost my best friend. And it was like five years ago when I lost my nephew’s father, my brother-in-law.”
His portraits of people he has known who have died cover a span of about 10 years, Winfrey says. “Doing the portraits probably was the most therapeutic because it was like I was having a conversation with them and reflecting on a lot of memories.”
Instead of pushing away memories of these people, Winfrey decided to “dive into some of those memories and the way they impacted me and shaped me. ‘Cause I wouldn’t be the same person without any of these people.”
A native Memphian, Winfrey grew up in an artistic family. His parents are Jen and John Winfrey, owners of Winfrey Works. “My mom does all those ceramic flowers and my dad, all the metal work.”
Winfrey, whose first creative expression was writing his initials on everything he came across, wasn’t encouraged by his parents to become an artist. “My mom always told me not to become an artist because I’ll be broke. But I did anyway.”
Street art was his first artistic endeavor. “I was projecting big images of zebras and things. Spray painting them on walls around the city. There are still some around. I kind of slowed down on that when I was 18 because I didn’t want to go to jail.”
He created paintings on canvas using stencils while at Overton High School. “I did a lot of work about Memphis and about the history of Memphis. Like I did a lot of MLK paintings and just paintings of our trolleys. That was mostly high school. And when I went to college, I mostly focused on cartoons.”
The last pieces he did at Memphis College of Art were rotoscopes. “It’s basically taking film and tracing over each frame.”
“Drift,” one of those pieces, is “about floating through life. Letting things affect you as you walk through life. Each little clip was a different obstacle. Like me climbing up a hill, climbing up a ladder, jumping off of something. And it all looped back to me going to sleep.”
That film was “just about the day to day struggle.”
Which Winfrey knew first hand. “I had a big struggle with my mental health. When I was in college, I had to take a couple of months off to come back to grips. I fell into a psychosis because I lost my best friend and it kind of threw me out of reality for a while.”
When he was in high school, Winfrey tried to take his own life by taking pills. “I was like 15 or 16. And I had to get hospitalized. I feel like that’s another big reason why I like working with kids around that age.”
Approaching adulthood and starting to think, “What am I going to do with my life?” when you’re that age is “very stressful,” Winfrey says. He wants to help kids “not feel so weighted down by adulthood.”
After he graduated from college, Winfrey worked as a creative producer for about five years at ABC-24. He began freelancing after he left that job. “I was doing a lot of skit shows and comedy skits with some friends of mine. They’re still on the Internet somewhere.”
He began working with Graham Brewer, who introduced him to his dad, filmmaker Craig Brewer. Craig introduced him to Muck Sticky, who then introduced him to Al Kapone. “We made a music video with Al Kapone and Muck Sticky cause he [Kapone] liked my work.”
Winfrey began making cinemagraphs. “It’s kind of like a photo that is slightly animated in that all the photos come alive.”
He made the water, wind, and the Hernando de Soto Bridge move in a cinemagraph in Kapone’s “Oh Boy” video.
Winfrey also worked on a podcast with the performer, FreeSol, for about a year and a half.
He made a video of rapper DaBaby at Beale Street Music Festival.
He included his work in Indie Memphis Film Festival, where his “Oh Boy” video came in number two in the Hometowner Music Videos category in 2019.
Winfrey’s creativity doesn’t stop at filmmaking and painting. “I also design a lot of clothes. I have a website I sell clothes through. It’s called existential67.com.”
He’s also a performer. “I used to have a band in college, as well: Emojicon1967.”
Winfrey rapped and wrote poetry. “It’s a lot of poetry on top of beats. I still write often. It’s another way I express myself. We had a few albums and we put on a lot of house shows. I still rap and I still write a lot of poetry, but I haven’t really brought it out to the public yet.”
He put the pause on a lot of his creative outlets to focus on his current show. “And try to find some sort of healing. I think this is going to be ongoing. I’m not going to be completely fixed until my last day of my life, I guess.”
Future plans include his upcoming marriage to Jamie Bigham.
As far as maybe moving someday, Winfrey says, “I definitely want to broaden my circle and get outside of Memphis. But I feel like there’s a lot of work that can be done on the ground floor here. And there’s a lot of talented people to work with constantly. I love working with kids and doing something for the community. That’s really fulfilling.”
And, he says, “My main goal is to be financially independent with only my art.”
But if he ever does move to another city, Winfrey says, “I’ve always got to come back to Memphis to drink the water. Because I guess there’s something in it.”
