What happens when cinema escapes the screen?
Looking to answer that question, the exhibition “Off-Screen Space” opened Oct. 1 at UC San Diego’s on-campus Mandeville Art Gallery. On view through Friday, Dec. 4, the new exhibition displays a variety of moving images — experimental film, multi-channel installations, video art and cinematic performances — across different screens and surfaces.
“Off-Screen Space” displays still and video art beyond traditional screens or across several. (Erika Johnson / UC San Diego)
To get the full exhibition experience, visitors must look at items all around them, from monitors and sculptures to the ceiling. Some installations experiment with different types of sound, too, either through headphones or ambient noise in the area.
“Off-Screen Space” was curated by UCSD associate professor Alison O’Daniel and created in tandem with UCSD’s Suraj Israni Center for Cinematic Arts. Housed within the UCSD Division of Arts and Humanities, the Suraj Israni Center for Cinematic Arts is “committed to promoting, advancing and advocating for film, filmmaking and the cinematic arts,” according to the university.
O’Daniel, a visual artist herself, was named the Suraj Israni Chancellor’s Endowed Chair in Cinematic Arts in September 2025. Upon her appointment, she also became the first endowed chair in the university’s Department of Visual Arts.
O’Daniel said the “Off-Screen Space” exhibition pays homage to all sorts of film and consists of pieces made by artists who live in or created work on the West Coast.
That group includes Victoria Fu, who was commissioned to create a ticker on the gallery’s facade that wraps around three sides of the building. Intended to be what she calls a visual poem, “Colorways” scrolls through over 200 commercial color names across the three-sided display. Each is rendered in the color for which it is named.
Victoria Fu’s “Colorways” wraps text with accompanying colors on the three sides of the Mandeville Art Gallery as part of the new exhibition, “Off-Screen Space” (Victoria Fu)
Fu borrowed color names from sources such as nail polish, automotive paint, interior paint and cosmetics. With these names appearing how they show up on the color spectrum, the sequence of colors can be “alternately funny, poetic, risqué, (and) moody,” she said.
It appears in a continuous loop, with the cycle ending and starting again every 40 minutes.
Fu is a professor of visual arts at the University of San Diego, and collaborated with painter Byron Kim to produce the mural “Suns” that was on view as part of the Murals of La Jolla program in 2016.
“Colorways,” marks her first artwork featuring solely text and something she created with the gallery site in mind.
“I had to take into consideration the very specific conditions of this site,” Fu said. “I knew it is a challenge for anything on the screen to be visible in full sun during the day, whereas the screen is very bright at night; that the mesh has a limited palette; (and) that people walking past would engage with it briefly, but probably repeatedly over the day or many days over a few months.”
She added, “I hope people who walk by can take away something no matter how briefly they encounter the work, perhaps over multiple passes in their daily commutes to (or) from class, from seeing a single phrase to ultimately grasping the ideas behind the work over many viewings. Though language pretends to capture it, color isn’t fixed, and is ultimately an abstraction that is specific to each person’s perception and associations with it.”
Artists featured in the new exhibition are: Fu, Ava Aviva Avnisan, Dana Berman Duff, Zachary Epcar, Whitney Horn, Lev Kalman, Young Joon Kwak, Omar Lopex, Sarah Rara, Christopher Richmond, Rajee Samarasinghe, Lorna Simpson, Josh Tonies, Kerry Tribe, Adriana Trujillo, Jennifer West and Suné Woods (who goes by the artist name of Zomhlaba).
Learn more about “Off-Screen Space” at mandevilleartgallery.ucsd.edu/exhibitions/off-screen-space.html.