Duke Riley

In Echelon of Uncertainty Riley etches images and stories from the Newtown creek in Brooklyn, one of the most polluted waterways in the US, and home to many people that illegally moor their vessels there.

This video follows Michele Klimczak, one of the 250 year-round residents of Fishers Island on the easternmost tip of New York State. The beaches of the tiny island are regularly inundated with plastic trash, much of which comes from New York City. Klimczak cleans the beaches--her full time job and passion--removing as much as 25,000 pounds of plastic each year.

In Welcome Back to Wasteland Fishing, Riley gleans discarded single use and household plastic items from two New York City beaches (Gerritsen and Plumb Beach) and fashions the trash into DIY fishing lures he then uses to catch fish. Riley presents his experimentation and field research in the genre of popular YouTube fishing tutorial. Within these actualizations of hyper masculine tropes and bucolic imaginings amateur videographers often interweave subtle product endorsements and have gained mass appeal for their calming slow pace.

FLY BY NIGHT follows artist Duke Riley as he embarks on his biggest project to date -- training thousands of pigeons outfitted with tiny LEDs to twirl, swoop, and glide over the East River at dusk from a decommissioned naval vessel in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Commissioned by the public arts nonprofit Creative Time, the visually mesmerizing project received acclaim from the art world and the thousands of New Yorkers who witnessed the performances during the spring of 2016. The Village Voice awarded Riley a lifetime achievement award for "elevating the prestige of pigeons in the public consciousness." This piece follows Riley's process from conception to final performance, and ultimately like the project itself, examines urban humanity's relationship to the natural world.

In Welcome Back to Wasteland Fishing, Riley gleans discarded single use and household plastic items from two New York City beaches (Gerritsen and Plumb Beach) and fashions the trash into DIY fishing lures he then uses to catch fish. Riley presents his experimentation and field research in the genre of popular YouTube fishing tutorial. Within these actualizations of hyper masculine tropes and bucolic imaginings amateur videographers often interweave subtle product endorsements and have gained mass appeal for their calming slow pace.