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.


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.