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: Wastestream & Fieldwork
2018
steel, canvas, rust, public workshops
16’ x 7’ x 5.5’
Socrates Sculpture Park, New York

Joe Riley & Audrey Snyder’s collaborative sculpture, Into the ground, reflects on how urban ecologies uptake and transform contaminants, and how collective bodies realize agency through ground-up organizing. A rust-dyed cover, created through participatory workshops over the summer, shrouds a car-shaped steel armature, engaging with Socrates Sculpture Park’s history of transformation from landfill to public park. Into the ground calls on visibility and invisibility of discarded objecthood: is it an abandoned vehicle or a public monument? A rusted relic or a deliberate composition? A landfill or a park?

Against the backdrop of rising sea levels and political turmoil, our proposal Into the ground registers the complexity of recognizing and responding to ecological and geopolitical shifts around us. The work poses traces of waste, rendered invisible to the eye and conscience by dislocation, as negative commons. If we can hold land, shared resources, and public services in common, then we must also simultaneously hold shared contradictions and violence. Ecological ruin, waste disposal, and toxic debt are examples of money-losing residues which can be re-framed as common strategy for undermining the logic and relations of capitalism. 

As a site-specific installation, seires of field-work(s), and public programs, Into the Ground drew on the Socrates Sculpture Park’s history as an unregulated landfill, the flow of the river along its bank, and the visibility and invisibility of waste streams. The rust-dyed exterior of the sculpture was composed through a series of public artist-led workshops. These gatherings were collective examinations of the ground during which participants excavated discarded, lost, and found iron objects from the park. The communal rust-dyes produced an abstracted inprint of discarded material: describing practices of use, abandonment, and alchemical transformations over time.



Fieldwork for Into the Ground, 2018
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.

Rust dye and resist workshop, Socrates Sculpture Park, Summer 2018
Letterpress print for Into the Ground, 2018


Notes on process: