States of Rain

States of Rain is a curatorial project for SPRING/BREAK Art Fair featuring the works of artist Michael Hanley

Michael Handley, 2025, Hong Kong Garden, Silver Leaf, Aqua Resin, Noise Canceling Sound Board, Industrial Water Proofing Liquid, Industrial Air Conditioning Filter, 12in x 12in x 14in

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States of Rain plays in dust and downpour. Curator Michele Jaslow and artist Michael Handley, whose work uses cloud-seeding material coaxing moisture to coalesce into rain, explore America’s pursuit of its potential – The dream of shaping the land, suspended between scarcity and excess.

The fragility of paradise is woven into the American ideology of manifest destiny. An idea the United States created to expand and encompass the continent by bringing civilization and the good life to the frontier. Settlers sought to transform untamed and wild landscapes into agrarian paradises, often through large-scale alteration of the natural environment. This way of life often resulted in environmental destabilization or cultural ruptures; the fragility of paradise is exposed when imposing an idealized order upon complex ecosystems.

Controlling the weather supports the success of this pursuit, both uniquely American and universally relatable. Artist Michael Handley’s work here is rooted in American ideals, both the chase and the tools to examine and conquer. Handley examines how water, or the lack thereof, transforms drought-stricken landscapes by engaging in cloud seeding—dispersing material like silver iodide to induce rain — he highlights the human desire to engineer paradise in arid regions.

Handley’s work acts as a human attempt to summon abundance where nature withholds it, but the results are never guaranteed. The process itself is ephemeral—silver iodide particles dispersed into the sky, coaxing moisture to coalesce into rain that may fall unpredictably or not at all. This echoes the way paradise, whether a lush landscape or an emotional state, remains elusive—something that can be chased, but never fully secured.

Handley’s use of cloud seeding materials to stimulate weather modification adds a compelling voice to the idea of the fragility of paradise. To generate or retain an idealized environmental condition weather modification directly manipulates the intimate struggle between human desires and natural processes. The attempt to bring rain to arid landscapes and to control the weather, cloud seeding embodies both hope and hubris— a technological pursuit of paradise that is inherently fragile, uncertain, and potentially destabilizing.

Handley’s rain making work speaks to the impermanence of paradise and the delicate balance between intervention and consequence. For an individualist with a frontier spirit chasing the idea of paradise, Handley’s individual-sized rainmaker sculptures and vessels serve as an imagined item to pack in their trailblazer go bag. His relief sculptures have vessels extending from them acting as if they were an outstretched tongue pleading to catch the rain they summoned.

A direct line can be drawn from Handley to American West painter Maynard Dixon (1875-1946) and Great Depression photographer Dorthea Lange (1895 – 1965), who married in 1920 and divorced in 1935. A native of Utah, Handley is from the very place Maynard Dixon painted. Dixon’s radical modern portrayals of the Western landscape with geometric shaped clouds and shadows seem to be questioning his avowed desire for the “Old West” as he imagined it. Photographer Dorothea Lange documented the social elite, but at the onset of the Great Depression, she turned her lens from the studio to the street. In 1936 she traveled through the Midwest and west coast documenting rural poverty. This work includes her iconic 1936 photograph Migrant Mother, a gelatin silver print of a mother anxiously gazing into the distance, with children huddling close by.

Handley moves further back through the photographic timeline to focus on Daguerreotype photography. Where he finds a primary material connection between cloud seeding and photography of silver iodide. This connective material conflates time, the arts, science, and the ways we have come to know and feel nature. Through a process mimicking daguerreotype photography and cloud seeding Handley’s exposure of silver to light documents his keen choice of material and structure lays open nature both real and desired.

Rain mirrors the duality of paradise: it is both its sustenance and its undoing. The paradise we seek is always in flux, shaped and reshaped by forces beyond our control. It exists in moments, in glimpses, in the spaces between ideal and reality—always beautiful, always fragile. Michael Handley’s work explores these themes with a view from both the windshield and rear-view mirror, facing the reality, imagined, and longed for paradise.

SPRING/BREAK Art Show Fair

May 8 – 12, 2025
Regular Show Days 12PM – 7PM
75 Varick Street, NYC

Sunday, May 6, 2025
-Collectors First Look + Press Preview 12PM – 5pm
-VIP Opening Night 5PM – 8PM

Tuesday, May 7, 2025
VIP Preview Day 12PM-7PM

PRESS RELEASE | TICKETS

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Michael Handley received his BFA from the University of Utah and his MFA from the Yale School of Art in Sculpture, where he received the George R. Bunker Painting and Printmaking Award. Handley has exhibited nationally and internationally, showcasing his works based on rain modification, wildfires, and drought-stricken landscapes. In 2019, Handley attended the BANFF Centre for Arts and Creativity under the “Earthed” themed residency focusing on environmental degradation and was awarded the prestigious Louis Muhlstock Endowment for painting. Recent exhibitions include the “How Do I Measure My Gratitude” at The Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City, NY – Curated by Souhad Rafey, and “As the Lake Fades” – Utah Museum of Contemporary Art – Salt Lake City, Utah – Curated by Jared Steffensen. michaelhandleystudio.com

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Michele Jaslow is a Brooklyn based independent art curator, writer, and appraiser with a background in institutional collaborations curating thought-provoking artists that engage diverse audiences. Michele holds an MFA Cranbrook, BFA Purchase, and post-graduate NYU New Media. Michele recently co-founded arts hub ThinkFiner (thinkfiner.com). It’s initial effort, Digital Twin, is a digital based series aimed at a fresh perspective with current exhibitions based in New York, Loire Valley, and Budapest. It’s a bit about the light in different coordinates and a bit about fighting against our collective swipe and scroll habit. more…