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.

Parallel Cases
2012
railbike, letterpress, artist book (edition of 50), installation 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. Riley and Snyder took on the modalities of itinerant printers who once traveled the country by freight train, working as journeymen for newspapers as well as labor organizers and Wobblies. 

The artists built and road their rail-bikes with the aim of producing a primary document of an experience of the past and present states of the abandoned railroad lines they traveled. In Parallel Cases, the rail-bikes are a way of producing an alternate mode of travel along these once-used lines.



Inspired by the legacy and tradition of intinerant or tramp printers the artists restored a 3” by 5” Kelsey Excelsior hand operated letterpress that was used, in situ, to publish a chronicle of the project in the forgotten right-of-way. Similarly to the web of communication inherently produced by railroad transportation, the project’s array of prints, drawings, maps, and letters form alternative narratives of abandoned railroads that allows for variation in memory and re-use. 



Parallel Cases recalls this history to the surface of post-industrial enclosure. The project is a movement with no fixed location but instead, represents “deterritorialisation” of abandoned railroad corridors. It is a mobile and nomadic illustration of past and present possibiltities for reconfiguring technology and reorienting toward low-tech, alternative modes of travel, and political education. In doing so, the project sits at the conjuncture of printmaking, sculpture, historical narrative, and collaborative form. The work exhibited in New York and is documented in a book — written, printed, and bound by the artists.

Letterpress printed and hand bound an edition of 50 books entitled, Parallel Cases. Within its 42 pages are letterpress printed images and text of railbiking, printing, and searching out abandoned railroads in Northern California and Oregon this past summer — a constellation of the findings, research, anecdotes, and methods of the project.