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.


Managed Retreat No. 1
2024
steel, stone, paint, tires
15” x 16” x 52”
 Managed Retreat is a sculptural meditation on current frameworks for moving human infrastructures and settlements away from coastal areas in response to a complex of climate-related crises. The realignment of coastal places and communities is a fraught proposition entangled with structural inequity, logics of property and ownership, and concerns for cultural and community survivance. 

In this work, climate-driven/driving alterations of space and the problematics of “managed retreat” are distilled in the form of a utilitarian hand truck typically used to transport heavy items short distances. Its configuration and functionality are modified by stones that are captured, if not assimilated, within the object’s steel structure.

Each stone is sourced from the aftermath of a cliff collapse, flood, or site of significant coastal erosion impacting infrastructures and/or coastal developments situated within the Tongva-Chumash-Kizh, Acjachemen, and Kumeyayy territories known as Southern California. Collection sites include: slope failures undermining the LOSSAN Rail Corridor's (Pacific Surfliner) cliffside route through Del Mar and San Clemente, public beach access areas inundated by winter storm and tidal surges, oceanfront estates with record-setting valuations, condemned beach houses, and an artificial landscaping feature installed at a UC Chancellor’s residence that overlooks the Pacific from atop a sacred Kumeyaay burial site.

The sculpture’s index of re- and displaced rocks posits the politics and temporalities of “managed retreat” as a continuing and recursive process of deracination. Yet the stones also render the hand truck useless, staging a rethinking of temporality and (f)utility hho benefits?” from climate-driven uprooting. Through its craft, conscious collecting, and research, the project pursues interrelated historical-material questions and speculative gestures: is the unfolding process of “managed retreat” an ongoing settler incursion—an unfettered attack? Or can it be reimagined and reconfigured as a way of moving toward just transitions, reparation, and rematriation?

Notes on process: