JOERILEY.WORK




joriley@ucsd.edu
@pleasedontfront
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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.


Into the Ground: LA River
2019
steel, canvas, rust
16’ x 7’ x 5.5’
Bowtie Project, Clockshop, Los Angeles
 Into the Ground is a collaborative sculpture by Joe Riley and Audrey Snyder originally commissioned for The Socrates Annual at Socrates Sculpture Park in New York (2018-19) and reconfigured and reinstalled with Clockshop Los Angeles in 2019-20. 

Letterpress print for the Bowtie project, 2019


For the sculpture’s West Coast debut, Riley and Snyder removed the original rust-dyed cover from the car-armature and used the material to re-upholster seats that were welded into the steel frame. The cover of the car was peeled back, and pulled into the interior, staging a switching maneuver between work’s internal structure and external covering. From the inside out, the seats invited pause or rest near the center of the Bowtie Project (a former railroad yard situated along the LA River)—a former privately held transportation center undergoing transformation into a public park and rewilded urban waterway. Situated at the Bowtie, Into the Ground served as a reminder that Los Angeles is a place where centers are, at any given moment, often unfixed and mutable. Rather than driving toward another destination or set of desires, the project invited vistors pause, rest, and re-center their own connections to histories place, placement, and displacement of site and city. 

Notes on process: