LA JOLLA, CA.- This is the first artist collaboration between Victoria Fu, who primarily works with moving images, and Byron Kim, who is a painter. For this project, the starting image in the mural was taken from a top floor window of the site, the Empress Hotel in La Jolla. The resulting image went through a process of being printed, and then re-photographed as a printed photograph hung on a wall, staged with lighting in the studio. The glowing orb that appears sun-like is a reflection of a studio lamp on the photo's material surface. Its slanted incandescent light as captured on the studio surface echoes the actual raking light of a La Jolla sunset on the hotel's exterior walls. The result of this process and staging is made legible to the viewer as "a photograph of a photograph," the mural image a displaced reference to the actual view from the site. The artists worked toward a methodology that embraces the mural's medium as digital image printed on vinyl. The mural in-situ is self-reflexive, at times blending in with the actual La Jolla sky behind it, yet remaining a nod to the studio, the printing and photographing process, and the image as object.

Victoria Fu was born in Santa Monica, California. She received her BA with a distinction in art from Stanford University. She went on to receive her MA in Art History at the University of Southern California and her MFA from California Institute of the Arts in tandem with the Universitate der Kunste in Berlin, Germany. She furthered pursued her education through study at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Whitney Independent Study Program. Fu creates immersive installation spaces that incorporate 16mm film, photography, sound, and video. Her work seeks to explore virtual space and how the viewer can tactically interact with digital environments. Her work has been featured in many notable solo and group exhibitions, including the 2014 Whitney Biennial and The 52nd New York Film Festival. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Byron Kim was born in La Jolla in 1961. He received his BA from Yale University and went on to continue his education in the arts at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine. Kim is most known for his minimalist paintings created in the 1990s. Through the structure of minimalism, he grapples with issues of racial and political identity. He often works with a monochromatic or dichromatic palette to succinctly explore ways of color-sampling objects, places, or people. His work has been featured in many exhibitions both nationally and internationally. His work, Synecdoche, featured as a part of the 1993 Whitney Biennial received notable recognition. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Murals of La Jolla offers tours the last Wednesday of the month starting at the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library at 5:30 p.m. RSVPs are suggested. To date, works by Terry Allen, John Baldessari, Mel Bochner, Mark Bradford, Kelsey Brookes, Gajin Fujita, Anya Gallaccio, Robert Ginder, Ann Hamilton, Jean Lowe, Robert Irwin/Philipp Scholz Rittermann, Nina Katchadourian, Kim MacConnel, Ryan McGinness, Roy McMakin, Richard Allen Morris, Catherine Opie, Julian Opie, Marcos Ramirez ERRE, Fred Tomaselli, and William Wegman, have been installed throughout La Jolla. Six of these have been replaced or temporarily removed. Overall, 22 murals have been commissioned since 2010.