SELECTED WORK(S)

Passengers of Change: Ballast Bench

2024
20’ x 20’ x 10’
steel, rocks, digital collage, ballast water, paint, seaweed
Birch Aquarium, San Diego

Somewhere between a marine science laboratory bench, a rocking chair, a waterbed, and the hold of a cargo ship, Ballast Bench, is a key element of the project Passengers of Change.

Passengers of Change

2024
20’ x 20’ x 10’
steel, rocks, digital collage, ballast water, paint, seaweed
Birch Aquarium, San Diego

Taking Undaria pinnatifida (wakame) as a framework for critique of the characterization of species, human and nonhuman, as “non-native” and “invasive,” scientist Danielle McHaskell, artist/writer Joe Riley, and artist Audrey Snyder explore the hydropolitical ecology odistributed seaweed Undaria pinnatifida.

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.

Passengers of Change: Ballast Stools

2024
15” x 15” x 18”
steel, rocks, plywood, laminate

Three stools for the Passengers of Change: Ballast Bench project and installation

Into the Ground: Wastestreams & Fieldwork

2018
Steel, canvas, rust
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.

Into the Ground: LA River

2019
Steel, canvas, rust
16’ x 7’ x 5.5’
Bowtie Project, Clockshop, Los Angeles

Wastestreaming

2018
digital photography, collage, animation, shovels, printed text

Joe Riley and Audrey Snyder identified ninety seven transfer and destination sites for NYC solid waste and recycling material. In 2017-18 they traveled to forty six of these sites, in an effort to trace connectivity between urban and rural concourses in the chain of removal and dispersion of waste: a navigation of the wastestream. The artists composed photographic and stop-animation portraits for each of these interchanges of the waste network.

The Enigma Of

2017
6’x 6’x 8’
Foam, fiberglass, mirror, PVC pipe, water pump, and essay

Two surfboards shaped after a c.1950 hydraulic economic model of a capitalist economic system. The work maps the history of surfing – a complex register of colonialism, military and domestic industry, masculinity, counter and mainstream culture, and the contested space of the shore – against the deployment of marine metaphors as descriptors of capital.

Rail Sail

2016
Vehicle, video, social sculpture

A wind-powered railroad vehicle connects urban and rural concourses, guided by chance and desire rather than reason or economy.

Parallel Cases

2012
letterpress, railbike, abandoned railroad

In the summer of 2012, collaborators Joe Riley and Audrey Snyder travelled atop abandoned railroads throughout California and Oregon (USA) on a pair of railbikes. Using a small letterpress, some ink, type, and paper they recorded their journey and exploration of two concurrent histories: the demise of railroad infrastructure and the cultural and technological shifts in commercial printing.