Joe Cantrell | Featured Artist

Featured Artist & Ongoing Creative Collaborator

Joe Cantrell is an ongoing artistic collaborator with Resonance Ensemble. His photography is featured throughout our Season 18 visual identity, capturing the unexpected connections between people, place, nature, and the imagination that are at the heart of our work.

We’re grateful to Joe for sharing his vision with Resonance—and for letting us see the world through his eyes.

Joe’s Words

I am a member of the Cherokee tribe, raised in Cherokee County, Oklahoma, which may, or may not, have something to do with this.

As a child, I thought all things in nature had a Spirit. I broke rocks open to discover what lay inside them, but I always felt a pang when I did it, a little prayer asking forgiveness of the rock and the order that had placed it with me. Plant life was the same way, flowers looked and smelled beautiful, but the changes in their geometry as they passed through the life cycle were more enticing. Zen seemed to have more answers than science for me. Now approaching age seventy, digital photography makes those explorations visible for others. I’m just a valve. I point the shiny side of the camera at something, push the button, and things pass through so you can see them, too. Often, I don’t even “see” what I’m photographing, rather, I feel it and am thoroughly surprised when the final image appears.

*Resonance Season 18 Brochure featuring Cantrell’s photography*

So as you look here, these are YOUR images. You are participating by seeing them in your mind, from your perspective, and that invokes all that you are. The object, photograph, viewer and photographer become a single thing. We sense things relative to ourselves, according to human perspective based on an average size of, say, 170 cm. tall, 75 kg. So, something that is the size of a fingernail seems “small,” and an automobile seems “large.” Yet in a universal perspective (whether we are aware or not, the one in which we all exist) our entire planet seems microscopic, and we, with all our “achievements,” and superstitions and egos, an insignificant, self-destructive nothing. BUT, we are part of All That! See!

— Joe Cantrell