JOERILEY.WORK




joriley@ucsd.edu
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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 2018-present







Passengers of Change
2020-2025

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 of a seaweed widely used in the food industry in all of its uncontainable mobility and multiplicity. Ecologists have used the term “passenger” to characterize “nonnative” and “invasive” species as ocean habitat freeloaders. Undaria is one of two macroalgal “passenger” species included among the world’s 100 “most invasive” organisms. The fault lines between invasion and invasiveness and native and non-native are taken as points of conceptual contact for boundary work between artists and scientists in the study of Undaria’s improvisational and historical patterns of colonization. 

Passengers of Change references the transportation of seaweed biota in contemporary cargo ship ballast tanks as well as the photographic and phycological materials stored in the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Archives. Undaria is viewed in the context of the rapid globalization of postwar shipping and in its “invasion” of foreign bioregions such as Southern California. It is cast as a passenger of change in this project’s production of both an image archive, chronicling Undaria’s history as a change agent, and a living archive, in the form of a “ballast bench” — seating that doubles as an observation tank housing an experimental study of Undaria’s growth.

Passengers of Change was commisioned for a Getty Pacific Standard Time: Art and Science Collide partnership between UC San Diego Visual Arts and Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Embodied Pacific featured projects by thirty artists working with researchers in laboratories, field sites, and archives in SoCal and the Pacific Islands, inviting immersive engagement in oceanography, Indigenous design, and critical craft through exhibitions, workshops, and programs at six interrelated venues.  

www.passengersofchange.com

Selected images from Passengers of Change: Ballast Wall:



Passengers of Change presentation at 2024 Getty Graduate Symposium:



 

Passengers of Change: Ballast Stools
2025
steel, stone, plywood, laminate
15” x 15” x 18”
 Based on classic Aalto stools, and borrowing appearance from standard scientific laboratory benches, these rockbound seats are components of the project Passengers of Change. They were designed and created for use during a series of scientific experiments studying invasive algae sporophytes and gametophytes inside Ballast Bench.

More about Passengers of Change here, and at www.passengersofchange.com

Notes on process:




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:




Passengers of Change: Ballast Bench
2024
steel, rocks, digital collage, ballast water, paint, seaweed, archival matter, public workshops
102” x 36” x 20”
 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.

The rocking bench doubles as an observation tank housing an experimental study of Undaria pinnatifida’s growth. Roughly the size of a laboratory work table, the Ballast Bench borrows its hybrid form from the laboratory bench and the ballast tank. The benchtop opens to reveal four chambers containing incubators that house experimental and control samples of seawater inoculated with hundreds of Undaria sporophytes and gametophytes. This watery cargo is a simulated liquid ballast and a medium for an experimental study of the microscopic stages of Undaria over the temporal course of an ocean crossing ship’s passage, a timespan that is clocked, many times over in the case of the installation at Birch, within the duration of an art exhibition. 



When visitors sit atop and rock the bench back and forth, they mimic a ship's pitch and roll, making waves inside a concealed world. Bench sitters are passengers of a marine scientific experiment through which the survival and reproduction rates of tiny invasive algae spores under these ballast tank conditions are monitored and tracked in a scientific analysis that cross-references the survival and growth of Undaria inside the bench with those out in the field, at coastal sites and within the dark holds of cargo ships. In Winter and Spring 2025, marine ecologist, and Passengers of Change collaborator Danielle McHaskell conducted experiments using Ballast Bench, in situ, at the aquarium.

More about Passengers of Change here, and at www.passengersofchange.com

Notes on process:





Passengers of Change: Seaweed Horizons
2023
public workshop, seaweed, wood, herbarium press
 On June 2, 2023, the Scripps Insitution of Oceanography Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation (CMBC) hosted “Seaweed Horizons,” a workshop which brought together scholars and scientists from across UC San Diego and the greater San Diego region for interdisciplinary conversations, presentations, and a hands-on workshop about marine algae. Workshop participants learned the process of to gathering samples of invasive seaweeds like Undaria pinnatiffida and Sargassum Horneri from Mission Bay and the San Diego Harbor as well as pressing seaweeds at the lab bench. 

For the workshop, the artist created an wood herbarium bench, which was used in the lab to create large-scale compositions with Undaria and other local kelps.

More about Passengers of Change here, and at www.passengersofchange.com



(S)tools for the Mothership
2022
wood, newspaper, fabric webbing, plants
 In 2022 Audrey Snyder and I had an opportunity to travel to Tangier, Morocco for an artist residency called The Mothership which is run by the artist Yto Barrada. The residency is surrounded, and grounded, by a garden of tinctorial plants. The flowers grown in the garden are used by Yto and the many visitors to this place to dye textiles, make pigments, and more. While at the Mothership we helped lead some of these workshops making pigments and dyes from the Mothership’s plants.

The first image in the image gallery above shows three stools. Shortly after we arrived in Tangier, Yto directed our attention to the small wooden stool in the center there. She said that The Mothership could use some more of these stools, which are common throughout the city and country. Street vendors perch atop these stools; people shine shoes from these stools; they are in kitchens, sidewalks, and gardens. Although they appear all over, these stools are also hard to come by. Like any favorite/perfect chair, they can be deeply personal and attached to the place.

Audrey and I collected discarded materials, useful debris, flotsam, jetsam, and various hand tools scattered around the grounds of The Mothership. We tried to learn from the stool that Yto shared with us, and to fold its brilliance and usefulness back into the forms and functions of the dye garden. We adapted the design of the stool into a dye-garden tool by turning them into herbarium presses—simple instruments which are widely used in scientific botany for the purpose of drying and preserving plant specimens.

Lake pigment dye workshop at the Mothership, July 2022:
 


Into the Ground: LA River
2019
steel, canvas, rust
16’ x 7’ x 5.5’
Bowtie Project, Clockshop, Los Angeles
 Into the ground is a collaborative sculpture by Joe Riley and Audrey Snyder originally commissioned for The Socrates Annual at Socrates Sculpture Park in New York. For the sculpture’s West Coast debut, Riley and Snyder adapted the structure to include a seat, reupholstered with a rust-dyed cover made during participatory workshops at Socrates. During these workshops, attendees excavated iron objects from the park and participated in a communal rust-dye to produce an abstracted imprint of discarded material. This process highlights practices of use, abandonment, and alchemical transformations over time.

Socrates Park, was once an unsanctioned landfill and dumping area filled with debris, discarded metals, and most certainly old cars and car parts. In the 1980s a coalition of artists and community members began removing and using these materials and installing artworks on the site. 

Situated at the Bowtie, the artists adapted the sculpture to respond more specifically to this site’s history, needs, and causes for use. At Socrates, this sculpture engaged with the park’s history of transformation from landfill to public park, and in Los Angeles, the project drew similar parallels to the Bowtie’s ongoing transformation-in-progress. 

Letterpress print for the Bowtie project, 2019


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.

Notes on process: 





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:




Wastestreaming
2018
digital photography, collage, animation, shovels, written & visual essay 
 Since the closing of Fresh Kills Landfill in 2001, New York City’s solid waste is exported from the urban center via trucks, barges, trains, and transfer stations to a broad network of landfills, incinerators, and waste processing facilities around the U.S. As participants in the Freshkills Filed R/D Residency Program, 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.

Mapping this dispersal network prompts questions about the making, moving, and visibility of waste across widening urban peripheries. Fresh Kills, and its surrounding communities, bare a distinct relationship to the past through the material and histories buried beneath the surface of the ground. Now framed as an ongoing remediation project, Freshkills Park simultaneously represents a displaced burden of unsustainability. Our ongoing excavation of NYC’s wastestreams is an effort to resurface the diffusion of fourteen million tons of garbage in such a way that recreation in the park might also mean re-creating radical attention toward ecological ruin, toxic debt, waste disposal, and other forms of negative commons.



Excerpt from Wastestreaming animation, 2018

Excerpt from Wastestreaming essay broadside which accompanies the installation. PDF copy here.

A version of the essay was also published with Urban Omnibus, a publication of the Architectural League of NY in October 2019.

Selected images from Wastestreaming: