"Jason Mitcham 's childhood home in Greensboro, North Carolina, is no longer standing. In 2011, the local government seized the house and the land he grew up on via eminent domain to widen what was then High Point Road into what's now Gate City Boulevard. Mitcham last saw the site in 2023, when a paved highway blanketed where the neighborhood once stood, and fragments of garages and barns still marked the landscape."
"Mitcham shares that the film reflects a series of compounding devastations, both personal and local: "the collapse of my father's civil engineering and land-surveying firm after the 2008 housing crisis, my parents' bankruptcy, his death, followed by my mother's, and the community's fight against the commercial development that would permanently alter their neighborhood." It's worth watching the behind-the-scenes video that shares more of the artist's process and thinking."
Jason Mitcham's childhood home in Greensboro, North Carolina, was seized by local government in 2011 via eminent domain to widen High Point Road into Gate City Boulevard, leaving a paved highway and fragments of garages where the neighborhood once stood. Mitcham hand-painted Ever Behind the Sunset, a stop-motion film that combines expressive painted panels with audio from his mother and home videos from the 1980s. Thick, gestural brushstrokes animate themes of loss, grief, and remembrance. The film responds to compounding personal and local devastations including his family's financial collapse, deaths of his parents, and community fights against commercial development. Behind-the-scenes material and an archive of films and canvases are available online.
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