JOERILEY.WORK




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Photo: Natalie Conn

  Joe Riley is an artist, historian, and Ph.D. candidate at UC San Diego Visual Arts in a joint environmental research program with Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation. 

  Joe’s research has recently been supported by the Getty Scholars Program, a UCSD Rita L. Atkinson Fellowship, and the UC Humanities Research Institute. His dissertation, Fixing the Sea: Case Studies Toward A Critical Environmental History of Ocean Art and Science since 1970, foregrounds and critically examines histories and practices of interaction between artists, oceanographers, and marine life situated within California’s university-military-research complex.

  From 2020–2025 Joe has been a participating artist and co-curator for the Pacific Standard Time exhibition Embodied Pacific, featuring projects by thirty artists working with researchers in laboratories, field sites, and archives in Southern California and the Pacific Islands. 

  Previously, he was an Ocean Fellow with TBA21-Academy and participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program. Joe holds a BFA from The Cooper Union School of Art and has taught at UC San Diego, Cal State San Marcos, Stevens Institute of Technology, and The Cooper Union.


Passengers of Change: Ballast Bench
2024
steel, rocks, digital collage, ballast water, paint, seaweed, archival matter, public workshops
102” x 36” x 20”
 Somewhere between a marine science laboratory bench, a rocking chair, a waterbed, and the hold of a cargo ship, Ballast Bench, is a key element of the project Passengers of Change.

The rocking bench doubles as an observation tank housing an experimental study of Undaria pinnatifida’s growth. Roughly the size of a laboratory work table, the Ballast Bench borrows its hybrid form from the laboratory bench and the ballast tank. The benchtop opens to reveal four chambers containing incubators that house experimental and control samples of seawater inoculated with hundreds of Undaria sporophytes and gametophytes. This watery cargo is a simulated liquid ballast and a medium for an experimental study of the microscopic stages of Undaria over the temporal course of an ocean crossing ship’s passage, a timespan that is clocked, many times over in the case of the installation at Birch, within the duration of an art exhibition. 



When visitors sit atop and rock the bench back and forth, they mimic a ship's pitch and roll, making waves inside a concealed world. Bench sitters are passengers of a marine scientific experiment through which the survival and reproduction rates of tiny invasive algae spores under these ballast tank conditions are monitored and tracked in a scientific analysis that cross-references the survival and growth of Undaria inside the bench with those out in the field, at coastal sites and within the dark holds of cargo ships. In Winter and Spring 2025, marine ecologist, and Passengers of Change collaborator Danielle McHaskell conducted experiments using Ballast Bench, in situ, at the aquarium.

More about Passengers of Change here, and at www.passengersofchange.com

Notes on process: