ARTIST STATEMENT
Science tells us that visual experience is not a record of the world but a prediction of it. Consciousness, neuroscientists suggest, arises not from certainty but from error—when the brain’s expectations falter and we are jolted into awareness. My paintings reflect this rupture. They are made in the space between what is expected and what emerges, where image and surface press against each other and time becomes visible.
The paintings are both artifact and event. They invite slowed, contemplative looking, where color, texture, and form unfold gradually. I paint to explore the threshold where illusion meets material, where sensation gives rise to reflection. In doing so, I aim to create not just images, but conditions for perception—spaces where viewers can experience the instability, beauty, and mystery of simply being present.
My process begins with traditional methods—stretching, sizing, priming—which lay a foundation of the “past.” From there, the painting evolves in conversation with the materials. Marks are made, obscured, revised; the work remains in flux, oscillating between intention and accident, order and entropy.
Each canvas builds through accumulation. Layers of paint, marks, and handwritten text collect like sediment or graffiti on an ancient wall—fragments of language and memory dissolving into fields of color and form. These remnants evoke both the persistence of history and the ephemerality of digital noise, like a corrupted scan or glitched transmission. The result is a surface that appears simultaneously aged and futuristic, an excavation of our future selves.
Up close, the surface is intimate and tactile—scratched lines, carved text, ghosted fragments. From afar, these details resolve into compositions that flicker between coherence and collapse. This shifting register is where the perceptual meets the philosophical: what appears static from the outside becomes dynamic from within. Time, in these works, is not linear but experiential—a record of nested moments and revisions that trace consciousness and the mind at work.
BIO
Born 1977 in Wareham, MA.
In 1999 Riley received BFA in Painting from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. In 2004 he received an MFA in Sculpture from the University of Pennsylvania.
His work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions throughout the Northeast including; Hillyer Gallery in DC, Danese/Corey in New York City, TSA NY in Brooklyn, NY, Gallery 263 in Cambridge, MA, Lamont Gallery in Exeter, NH, Arthur Ross Gallery in Philadelphia, PA, The Arts Center of the Capital Region in Troy, NY, and several others.
He has received grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, The Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, and the Berkshire Taconic Foundation. Riley has been an artist in residence at the Joan Mitchell Center, Yaddo, and the Vermont Studio Center.
Riley currently lives and works in Washington DC and maintains a studio in Colle di Tora, in Italy's Turano Valley.