JOERILEY.WORK




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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.


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: