MAXUS101 is proud to present
Qualia
by Tonny Tromborg Sørensen
Since 2019, Tonny Tromborg Sørensen has woken up at 4 a.m. to travel the ragged, windswept headlands of Point Reyes National Seashore. At the tip of a hook-shaped landmass jutting into the Pacific Ocean, the glowing lighthouse is his final destination. Facing the open sea, he finds a safe space to set up his tripod and waits. Sørensen has spent three consecutive winters in this spot. Watching the expanse of the ocean churning in the darkness before him, he stays for the sun to illuminate the scene and provide a new palette each day. Tones emerge from the banks of fog, and beyond the fading horizon, silver-lined clouds materialize.The timing of his practice is carefully attuned to the shifting phenomena before him, and the time the artist awakes speaks to his dedication and acknowledgment of this hour’s mysticism. Dawn is the space where consciousness is born, this finite time between heaven and earth. Using specialized equipment and making exposures ranging from five to twenty minutes, he pushes the boundaries of the process and uncovers an astounding range of colors. The works in this series, titled Qualia, comprise hundreds of separate images layered, blended, and compressed on a single plane.In Sørensen’s photographs, which are devoid of details that might suggest the place or story, the primal
experience of staring at the horizon and meditating on the beyond becomes the work itself.
Referencing an early pioneer of combination printing, Gustave Le Gray is honored in the process, energy, and subject of Sørensen’s works. The long exposures of Hiroshi Sugimoto and vast landscapes by Richard Misrach come to mind, both staying loyal to the magnificence of the horizon. The layering effect done by the artist reinforces the power of abstraction, and this gathering of time and accumulation of frames transcends the artwork beyond the medium of photography. The images are private and indescribable. They are subjective and best comprehended directly. Sørensen was born in Copenhagen in 1964 and raised by his stepfather Steen Bjerregaard, a commercial photographer who opened the first digital photo studio in Denmark. After a successful professional sports career in Taekwondo and selling the lifestyle apparel brand Von Dutch Originals in 2009, he
began to explore the various creative possibilities in photography.
