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.
To memorialize this beloved landmark, Mitcham hand-painted “Ever Behind the Sunset,” a touching stop-motion film that combines a series of expressive compositions with audio from the artist’s mother and his own home videos taken throughout the 1980s. Panels of thick, gestural brushstrokes animate a story of loss, grief, and remembrance as if viewed through a dreamlike haze.
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. Explore an archive of his films and works on canvas on his website and Instagram. You might also like the paintings of Jeremy Miranda.
