In collaboration with the Suraj Israni Center for Cinematic Arts, this exhibition includes experimental narrative films, video art, multi-channel video installations and a cinematic performance - all made by artists who reside or created the work on the west coast and in the region. The works in the show exist across every surface of the gallery and expand the experience and expectations of the ‘screen'.

“Off-screen space” is a term used primarily in cinema that refers to a sensation that the image, sound, action and ideas can move past the edges of the screen. The off-screen space is possibly the most profound and magical space of cinema, because whether it is produced through the technical smoke and mirrors of cinematic production (such as editing or surround sound) or narrative construction (a subject looks fearfully beyond the frame and the audience braces for what might appear), it is also the undefined amorphous place where our human spectator bodies are touched by physical sound waves, light and shadow, and the affect and lasting impact of the moving image. The Off-screen space in cinema is where the suspension of disbelief occurs most poetically during the duration of the film. Even after the credits roll, off-screen space continues; it is where narrative, locations, characters and actions hover like ghosts, further develop, take on new meaning and shapeshift.

In this exhibition, the artworks expand these ideas even further off-screen. The screen becomes the object and the idea. Embodied multi-channel installations fragment time and narrative and challenge the eye, mind and body to comprehend a multiplicity of occurrences happening across several screens at once. Some of the pieces pull back the cinematic curtain or break the fourth wall to reveal the richness and complexity and equal importance of relationships between director, subject, crew, audience and even studio and sound stage - sites usually hidden and unseen. Several of the works fragment and disorient our bodies in relation to screens as the images’ physicalities trick, break down or fight against the container of the screen.

Finally, many of the artists in the show create works that challenge the hegemony of Hollywood. Off-screen space could also refer to the gallery, the museum, the experimental or black box theater - spaces that exist away from the historic, psychoanalytic projections and social contracts of desire and ownership that have so long flooded the construction and framing of images and bodies within the screens in theaters of the Hollywood film industry. Many of the films and videos in this show question desire, projection, and the framing of memory and history. These works propose new models of cinematic production and modes of participation and engagement that are rooted in the history of experimental film.

UC San Diego’s new Cinematic Arts and Film Studies major and the Suraj Israni Center for Cinematic Arts enables students to consider new models of cinematic production and thinking. Drawing on the decades-long rich history of interdisciplinary and critical approaches to media, moving image, and experimental video practices in the Department of Visual Arts at UC San Diego and across the university, this show emphasizes that the term ‘cinematic arts’ is expansive, inclusive, global, and evolving.