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.

Two Southforks (Dallas, Romania)
2013
Digital print, plywood, stencil, spray paint, neon sign
Just outside of the small town of Slobozia, Romania there’s a big, white, ranch house. That building is a reproduction of another big, white ranch house, near the city of Dallas, Texas. These twin ranches both have the same name: Southfork. This project tracks the story of how the American soap opera Dallas. was recreated by political and criminal actors in Romania following the country’s independence from the Soviet Union. A suspended neon sign recreates a central part of the the facade of Ilie Alexandru's Southfork ranch in Slobozia, Romania.  The sign is flanked by a photo of the same ranch, and its counterpart Southfork Ranch which still stands outside of Dallas, Texas.  A fourth image documents actor Larry Hagman, who played Dallas's star character J.R. Ewing, alongside Ilie Alexandru at the Slobozia site.

 Southfork, Slobozia, RomaniaSouthfork, Dallas, Texas, USA