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. For the sculpture’s West Coast debut, Riley and Snyder adapted the structure to include a seat, reupholstered with a rust-dyed cover made during participatory workshops at Socrates. During these workshops, attendees excavated iron objects from the park and participated in a communal rust-dye to produce an abstracted imprint of discarded material. This process highlights practices of use, abandonment, and alchemical transformations over time.

Socrates Park, was once an unsanctioned landfill and dumping area filled with debris, discarded metals, and most certainly old cars and car parts. In the 1980s a coalition of artists and community members began removing and using these materials and installing artworks on the site. 

Situated at the Bowtie, the artists adapted the sculpture to respond more specifically to this site’s history, needs, and causes for use. At Socrates, this sculpture engaged with the park’s history of transformation from landfill to public park, and in Los Angeles, the project drew similar parallels to the Bowtie’s ongoing transformation-in-progress. 

Letterpress print for the Bowtie project, 2019


In response to these parallel transformations the artists 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. 

From the inside out, the seats invited pause or rest near the center of the Bowtie—a geographic center that is not a static location. Centers change as people move around, such that a place may have multiple centers. Los Angeles is a place where the centers at any given moment are determined by automobiles. The installation carried an open invitation and memory that pauses to think back through the histories place, placement, and displacement of the site and city.

Notes on process: