Like so many humans throughout history, I create and perform ceremonies, prayers, and rituals in the hope of connecting myself with the earth and a larger spirit beyond oneself. This connective urge has led me to develop specific processes and the use of materials referencing the cause and effect of environmental and nature manipulation.

 Here is something you may not know. Both cloud seeding—an industrialized technique used to create and enhance rainstorms, a form of geoengineering—and daguerreotype photography, the source of how we have come to see the world through images, share the same primary material: silver iodide. The cultural richness in the relationship between the way we physically feel our environment through rain and storms and the source of how we have learned to experience nature through images should be blowing your mind. It did mine.

 In the aftermath of my mind explosion, I asked, “What is a landscape now that we can control nature?” Moreover, I told myself, “If these powers of weather manipulation and image creation exist in our earthly reality, it must be possible for me to combine the two and create my process.” A Weather Creation and Photographic Process. That is exactly what I have done in this body of work.

 ‘Sublimation’ is the ongoing body of work that combines materials and processes of cloud seeding with materials and methods from another industrialized cultural phenomenon: Daguerreotype photography. Once built, the works I create go through my process, ultimately acting as storm creators and photographs—slowly developing over time as a photogram.

 In this body of work, you will see 2D works embedded with symbols from meteorology, such as the symbols for wind, hail, and fog, as I create the storms I want to see. You will also see sculptures capturing organic forms derived from mechanisms used in cloudseeding, video installations of weather-mapping videos, and my metaphoric sculptural adaptations.

By positioning itself as equal parts alchemy, process-based art making and experimental science, Sublimation examines the technique of weather manipulation through cloud seeding, which is an attempt to add moisture by dispersing silver iodide and dry ice into clouds in hopes of creating rain to feed the arid landscapes below. Handley contrasts the potential for humans
to control nature with the idea that nature can control his art making practice. Water, in its various states, becomes the vehicle for this exploration.

Evaporation and sublimation are used to create artworks that reference early photography and abstract landscape paintings. Each process is allowed to run its course with the moisture eventually disappearing, leaving a record of their previous states of existence.

Through sculptures covered in iodine-exposed silver leaf, animated weather maps projected into dry ice vapor, and evaporation paintings, Handley asks the viewer to consider the question, if we become the manufacturers of nature, is it possible for nature to become the manufacturer of art?

Jared Steffensen - Curator of Exhibitions , Utah Museum of Contemporary Art