Mat Hennek: Sounds of Spheres

Hennek’s gorgeous photography taps into the harmonizing musical resonances of all living things

In the atmospheric photographs of Sounds of Spheres, New York– and California-based Mat Hennek (born 1969) creates striking impressions of how we imaginatively engage with nature. Whether depicting the world from a traditional receding perspective (a misty landscape at sunrise, snow-laden branches, palm trees bending in the wind) or from above (the serpentine curves of a river, fossil-like patterns in sand, the churning surface of the ocean), Hennek does not record nature but captures the apparitions it evokes. Through the soft blurring of edges, lyrical color and a focus on pattern, his images move between representation and abstraction, simultaneously capturing and veiling form. The idea of the sphere links subjects that may at first seem unrelated: the glowing ball of the setting sun, the round shapes of ice crystals in a miniature frozen universe, the great globe of the earth upon which all this unfolds.