JOERILEY.WORK




joriley@ucsd.edu
@pleasedontfront
linktr.ee/joeriley
mailing list
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.

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.