ARTIST STATEMENT
Through painting, I create layered images that function as evolving maps of consciousness and which investigate how meaning emerges through encounters between material experience and conceptual knowledge. Drawing from sources that range from ancient visual systems to contemporary cosmology and quantum mechanics, I examine how images can hold multiple ways of knowing and how perception is constructed, destabilized, and continually reconfigured within the information-dense conditions of the twenty-first century.
Central to my work is the recurring motif of the vessel. Appearing in shifting forms that range from organic and architectural structures to oval and spherical configurations, the vessel functions as both a physical and metaphorical container for holding thoughts and actions. It provides a framework through which intimate experiences and larger systems of knowledge can coexist, linking the personal to the cosmological.
My paintings develop through layered processes of drawing, incising, scratching, carving, and repeated revision that embed decisions beneath successive layers of paint. The resulting surfaces accumulate imagery, language, color, and texture into dense visual archives where time becomes materially present. Drawing from diverse visual traditions including Chinese landscape painting, Etruscan and Roman frescoes, Renaissance color palettes, celestial cartography, planetary photography, printmaking, and digital imaging, my paintings shift between abstraction and representation, coherence and dissolution, illusion and materiality.
Grounding this practice is an embrace of uncertainty as a condition that generates discovery. I am interested in how experiencing uncertainty expands the boundaries of what can be known. At a moment increasingly overwhelmed by artificial intelligence, predictive technologies, and political, social, and environmental instability, I seek to create paintings that compel sustained looking and cultivate ambiguity as a space for reflection and growth.
I am currently developing Spheres of Uncertainty, a cycle of large-scale, multi-panel oil paintings in which the vessel motif evolves into monumental, planet-like forms that function as repositories of information. Expanding both the physical and conceptual scale of my practice, the series continues my investigation into painting's capacity to give material form to the passage of time and our experience of it.
BIO
Born 1977 in Wareham, MA.
Riley holds an MFA in Sculpture from the University of Pennsylvania (2004) and a BFA in Painting from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (1999).
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.