Joe Riley

Joe Riley (b. 1990, USA) is an artist, researcher, sailor, and PhD student in Art History and Art Practice at University of California San Diego, where he also participates in the Program for Interdisciplinary Environmental Research at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. His research considers how the oceans have long been a source of cultural and visual techniques that mediate the co-production of human and nonhuman worlds.

Joe was a 2020 Ocean Fellow with TBA21-Academy’s Ocean Space in Venice, Italy. He has participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program (2016-17), Art & Law Program (2018), Interdisciplinary Art & Theory Program (2018-19), and was a student organizer with Free Cooper Union. He holds a BFA from Cooper Union (2013) and has taught at the Cooper Union School of Art, Stevens Institute of Technology, and Bruce High Quality Foundation University. Alongside Audrey Snyder, Joe was a fellow of the Socrates Sculpture Park Emerging Artist Fellowship (2018-19) and Fresh Kills Field R/D program (2017-18). His collaborative work with the collective Futurefarmers has exhibited widely, including Artes Mundi 7 and Sharjah Biennial 13.

http://joeriley.work

@pleasedontfront

Current work: 

UC San Diego’s project Oceanographic Art and Science: Navigating the Pacific, led by Lisa Cartwright and Nan Renner, explores the visual and sensory techniques, past and present, used to see, measure, and imagine the oceans. The charts, maps, vessels, and instruments historically used by scientists and Indigenous communities to navigate the Pacific will be engaged by teams of artists, scientists, and humanities scholars to reframe Pacific research in the wake of colonial science. Modern ways of mapping and displaying the movement and exchange of knowledge in the broader Pacific region across climate, Earth, polar, and ocean science will inform the development of new artworks that mine the archives of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, one of the largest, oldest, and most significant centers for ocean and Earth science research, and a longtime advocate of art-science collaboration. The exhibition will span two sites on the UC San Diego campus in La Jolla. The Geisel Library will showcase new works on paper and historical images and objects from the archives. At the Birch Aquarium at Scripps, new interventions by artists, ethnomusicologists, and filmmakers working with Scripps scientists will illuminate the Aquarium's living collections and serve as prototypes for new models of collaborative interdisciplinary research.

“Passengers of Change: Seaweeds in the Post-War Pacific” (working title) is a "Oceanographic Art and Science: Navigating the Pacific," project examining the interchange of seaweed gathering and agar-agar production between Southern California and Japan in the mid-twentieth century. Co-authored by Joe Riley, Audrey Snyder, and Danielle McHaskell, this collaborative project begins from a selection of photographs made by Claude M. Adams over the course of his work for the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), Fisheries Division, from 1945-51. The Adams images depict Japanese seaweed-gathering and processing techniques, which, over the course of the SCAP, were transformed in the image of industrial kelp harvesting and agar-agar production developed during WWII in Southern California. Agar-agar is a seaweed extract essential for a wide range of medical and industrial processes that were key to the material maintenance of the global war effort. 

These archived images, alongside terminology shared across the disciplines of marine biology and political ecology, reveal the niche held by seaweeds in the wake of the U.S. American occupation of Japan. Marine biologists use the nomenclature “passenger” and “driver” to describe the impact of “non-native” and “invasive” species in ocean habitats. In recent scientific literature, these categories are applied to Undaria pinnatifida, a seaweed native to coastal Japan, now included among the world’s most “invasive” marine organisms. The fault-lines between invasion, invasiveness, and native v. non-native dualities are also critical points of entry for political ecologists engaged in studying the relationships between social, political, and environmental changes. Taking the mobility and multiplicity of seaweeds as a framework, we aim to address the difficulties of knowing marine life worlds through our collaborative’s disciplinary coordinates in postcolonial history, media studies, visual arts, and marine biology.