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.
PROJECTS 2009-17






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

The Enigma Of is a configuration of two surfboards shaped after a c.1950 hydraulic economic model of a capitalist system. The project 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. The merger locates the desire to shape a world with a model alongside the desire of surfers to shape a board, read the shape of a wave, chase stoke. Both as a functional object and a sculpture, The enigma of: picks apart these desires and better understand how capital channels and distorts them as a strategy of accumulation. 

The work was exhibited on at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in 2017 and accompanying essay published in the unbag magazine issue #2. A revised version of the essay was published in Oceans Rising (Sternberg Press, May 2021). A PDF copy of the essay is available here.




  



ARE YOU RECEIVING ME?
2017
wood, grain, radio, post
Sharjah Biennial 13
collaboration w/ Futurefarmers

ARE YOU RECEIVING ME? (2017) is a linear display of 24 postcards that evoke a horizon line. The cards were the result of a project in which one message per hour, throughout an entire day, was sent via radio from Seed Journey to anthropologist Michael Taussig at his home in Brooklyn, US. A system of postcards was used to confirm reception of each message sent by artist Amy Franceschini. Adopting QSL Card vernacular used in the early days of radio broadcasting, each card included original watercolour by the artist and remarks by the anthropologist.

For SB13, Futurefarmers assemble as Amy Franceschini, Pieter Heremans, Martin Lundberg, Joe Riley, Audrey Snyder, Michael Swaine, Michael Taussig and Marthe Van Dessel. 

This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 13.



Seed Mast: Arrange
2017
wood, grain, performance
Hunter East Harlem Gallery, NYC
collaboration w/ Futurefarmers 
The exhibition Futurefarmers: Arrange highlighted specific projects from the past 23 years of Futurefarmers work and attempts to place the group into the canon of important socially engaged artists and designers. Arrange featured key thematic threads within the collective’s practice and the viewer is thrust into the world of Futurefarmers where, like a small ecosystem, their projects intertwine art, science, design and the environment. The exhibition title harks to an inherent resistance to the typical retrospective exhibition model and also the collective’s interest in arrangement, organization, and non-hierarchical cataloguing structures. The viewer, guided through the exhibition by professional actors—Messengers—sees art objects act as props to the stories, interpretations, and phantoms of Futurefarmers’ past projects through a scripted, performative experience. The exhibition can be understood as an experience that grasps the temporal and interstitial moments of dialogue, conversation, performance, and collaboration - processes that are deeply rooted in the work of Futurefarmers. 

For the exhibition, Seed Mast was re-arranged in the form of flotsam and jetsam in the wake of Seed Journey. Messengers rehearse the telling and re-telling of the journey around the wood and grain assembly. 

At the closing of Futurefarmers: Arrange, Futurefarmers together with Messengers and audience, rehearsed a traditional sea shanty and spiritual: Roll the Old Chariot Along. Participants rehearsed with song and whistling.






Rail Sail
2016
aluminum, fabric, railroad, video, and social sculpture
collaboration w/ Audrey Snyder and Ricki Dwyer  


Rail Sail is a collaborative project by artists Joe Riley, Audrey Snyder, and Ricki Dwyer re-imagining wind, sea, and sail within the context of atop the post-industrial corridors of abandoned railroads. A wind-powered railroad vehicle connects urban and rural concourses, guided by chance and desire rather than reason or economy. The railroad corridor—an early infrastructure toward the industrial annihilation of time and space—is reconfigured as a site for seriously playful degrowth. This effort presents a strategy of reclaiming—as a prairie might reclaim a fallow field—which undermines efficiencies of commodity production against a backdrop of resource extraction and ecological upheaval.



The wind in the sail for the Rail Sail project was a call on local project participants helping with navigating KC-area railroads, agricultural history, and rivers. Following the opening at Front/Space, participants gathered around a series of meals and discussion to plan the launch of Rail Sail. Responding to the question: “where is the railroad?” participants offered to “guide” or “ride” with the Rail Sail at several sites in and around the city. This merging of geography and memory came together as two rivers might meet, ebb, flood and recede.



Rail Sail was first launched in Kansas City, MO/KS — once a grain producing capital of the U.S., ahead of the the great “plow-up” which prefigured the Dust Bowl and defined the Great Depression. Subject to the violence of commodity farming for the market place, fields of wheat became seas of dust. Ever since, the Midwestern U.S. has remained a site where rippling wheatfields are translated into units of mutable exchange. At the collision site of climate change and monoculture based farming our present challenge is to reimagine the configuration of urbanism and ecology in a way that is not dictated by a market. 


Rail Sail opening at Front/Space, Kansas City, MO, Augut 2016.
We began the project by looking at the meeting of land and sea, specifically where railroads infrastructure connects with shipping. These are points of interchange where an industrialized landscape meets the landscape of the sea, sites are where the strikingly different modes of transportation (railroad and sea) are combined through the passage of goods. The abrupt meeting point of railroads and shipping was made seamless by the neoliberal project of containerization which was also a central factor in dismantling organized labor all over the world and abandonment of vast amounts of railroad infrastructure in the US. The network of auto-industry highways and the trucking industry supplanted the railroad and container ships became trains on the sea. 

Our research involved several gatherings, events, and melding of visitors and friends. While moving west from NYC with Rail Sail, we intersected with Einat Imber and Erin Diebboll who were driving east with a folded burlap boat in tow. Rail Sail and Sea to Sea converged at MINT Collective in Columbus, Ohio. This "confluence" continued and grews into a gathering at Front/Space on Friday, August 5.  Inside the gallery space a video installation, a small library, research materials, a handrawn map of the Kansas City area functioned as a way to orient the project in the local landscape. Visitors were invited to add locations and memories of area railroad tracks to the map and these locations became a starting place for our research of where and when the Rail Sail would launch.  




Seed Mast: Provisioning
2015
16' x 4' x 3'
wood, grains, rope, print
CUNY James Gallery, NYC
For the exhibition Left Coast: California Political Art, the San Francisco-based arts collective Futurefarmers, Amy Franceschini, Audrey Snyder, and Joe Riley, banded together across continents and oceans to create a new work, entitled Seed Mast: Provisioning. The piece is a traditionally constructed boat mast and spar, filled with grain collected from all over and currently being grown by Futurefarmers at Slow Space in Oslo, Norway. The wooden mast is stepped into a chute covered by a fine patina of flour and water, and a horizontal spar holds a growing collection of seeds as it might a sail. 

At once a library and a silo, this seed mast is the first of many steps in provisioning toward the Flatbread Society Seed Journey — a voyage in which the grains will be transported back to their geographic origins in Jordan. This reverse migration is imagined as a “rescue,” and falls within a larger movement to protect the rights of small farmers. The project also imagines food, and grains in particular, as a symbol of resistance in the wake of intellectual property rights as they relate to biological matter.

As a preparation and anchor of the forthcoming journey, Seed Mast: Provisioning is also accompanied by a broadside print which details the mast's storied cargo along with a new text entitled Seeds of Time, written by anthropologist Michael Taussig for the Flatbread Society Seed Journey. 

Seed Mast was on display for the Left Coast exhibition, April 15, 2015 through May 29 at the CUNY Graduate Center James Gallery.
 


Soil Procession
2015
procession, ground-building ceremony, land declaration 
Losaeter, Oslo, Norway
in collaboration Futurefarmers
The grains carried aboard Seed Journey (2017) were cultivated as part of a "groundbuilding" effort at Futurefarmers-led project site in Oslo, Norway. Losæter is a new cultural institution on a common along the waterfront in Bjørvika (Oslo) dedicated to a range of activities related to art and urban food production. It includes Flatbread Society’s activities, Herligheten allotment community, an ancient grain field, a bakehouse and Oslo’s first City farmer. Losæter is a space in constant organic development. Pictured here is the grainfield topped with a map of soils from across Norway. I was a collaborator for the Soil Procession and Seed Journey aspects of the Losæter project.

Soil Procession posters by Amy Franceschini, Futurefarmers. Download a PDF copy here.

On June 13, 2015 a procession of farmers carried soil from their farms through the city of Oslo to its new home at Losæter. Soil Procession was a groundbuilding ceremony that used the soil collected from over fifty Norwegian farms from as far north as Tromsø and as far south as Stokke, to build the foundation of the Flatbread Society Grain Field and Bakehouse. A procession of soil and people through Oslo drew attention to this historical, symbolic moment of the transition of a piece of land into a permanent stage for art and action related to food production. 



At high noon, farmers gathered at the Oslo Botanical Gardens joined by city dwellers. Tractors, horses, wagons, wheelbarrows, musical instruments, voices, sheep, boats, backpacks and bikes processed to Losæter where the farmers’ soil offerings were laid out upon the site and a Land Declaration was signed:

“With the establishment of Losæter at Loallmenningen, we mark our commitment to support and highlight agriculture as a central part of the Bjørvikas cultural landscape. We hereby declare Losæter acultural commons. Losæter shall advance and contribute to the free and open exchange of seeds, knowledge, and relationships that grew out of this place. By signing this document, living traditions should be protected from any laws that interfere with these activities and that may be obstacles to the cultivation, distribution and future use of the biological material that grows on this land. The Flatbread Society Grainfield is an expression for this agreement. Unlike museums that collect and preserve works of art, The Flatbread Society Grainfield is a museum without walls that preserves through sharing and distribution.”

 


Radio Chain
2014
performance, pirate radio
Izolyatsia Platform for Cultural Initiatives, Kyiv,Ukraine
Radio Chain was a performative mobile installation created in October 2014 as part of the Izolyatsia Platform for Cultural Initiatives project “ZAHOPLENNYA”. A chain of participants were connected by individual radio units built by the artist which receive and re-transmit a broadcast from one unit to the next. During the performance, participants passed through the city connected only by radio waves, navigating their route based on the clarity of signal reception, and physically extending the reach of the broadcast. The broadcast content consisted of interviews with Ukrainian soldiers conducted by artists Yulia Kostereva, Yuri Kruchak, and journalist Maria Prokpneko. 






Free Cooper Stanchions
2013
12” x 24” x 48”
ash, balsa, velvet rope, glass, picture frame 
A laser cut facade of the Cooper Union Foundation Building, updated with the signs and symbols of the student protests against tuition at Cooper Union. The streamers are from the 2012 day of action, the "Free Education to All" banner from the December 2012 lock-in, and the red-illuminated windows of the President's office from the 65 day-long student occupation. Two halves of a wooden (ash) stanchion flank the frame.






The Politics of Destruction
2013
performance with Free Cooper Union
e-flux, NYC 
On November 24th, 2013 at e-flux, Free Cooper Union held a performative reading of the 41-page Board of Trustee meeting transcript leaked by the Village Voice in July 2013 and first performed by Free Cooper in May 2013 during the student occupation of the Cooper Union President's Office. For the Performance, students play the roles of trustees and Jamshed Bharucha’s lines are played by a computerized text-to-speech tool.

Weak coffee and mini-hot-dog hors d’oeuvres were served, and the performance was reviewed by Hyperallergic.