436 E. 47th Street, the film screening is a popup temporary installation.
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Phantom Gallery Chicago- Film Projection Project Manager Suzetta Withtaker
Featured Artist Renee Baker
Film 1: The Black Fertile Mind
The Black Fertile Mind is an exploration of boundless creativity, celebrating the intellect, resilience, and innovation of Black thought. This film interweaves evocative visuals with a dynamic score by Renee C. Baker, performed by the Chicago Modern Orchestra Project and the Modern Black Music Ensemble. The soundtrack melds elements of avant-garde jazz, experimental chamber music, and abstract soundscapes, reflecting the depth and complexity of the Black artistic imagination. As the film unfolds, it delves into the vast landscapes of Black intellectual history, presenting a narrative that is at once historical and visionary. The visuals are complemented by the sonic textures that highlight the journey of ideas, inventions, and artistic expressions born from a fertile cultural legacy.
Film 2: EMAK 1
EMAK 1 is a sensory journey into the enigmatic and the surreal, guided by Renee C. Baker's innovative score. This experimental film embraces the abstraction of thought and form, creating a dreamlike narrative that defies traditional storytelling. The Chicago Modern Orchestra Project and the Modern Black Music Ensemble provide a sonic tapestry that oscillates between ethereal atmospheres and dissonant crescendos, reflecting the film's exploration of consciousness and the unknown. The visuals are a montage of abstract shapes, shifting patterns, and fleeting images, inviting viewers to immerse themselves in the subconscious and question the boundaries between reality and illusion.
Film 3: EMAK 2
EMAK 2 continues the exploration of the surreal begun in its predecessor, deepening the immersion into an auditory and visual world that is both mysterious and profound. The score, crafted by Renee C. Baker and brought to life by the Chicago Modern Orchestra Project and the Modern Black Music Ensemble, is an intricate composition that blends dissonance with harmony, creating a soundscape that feels simultaneously familiar and alien. The film navigates themes of transformation and transcendence, using its avant-garde aesthetic to challenge perceptions and provoke thought. The visuals, a fluid collage of moving images, mirror the music's complexity, crafting an experience that is introspective, meditative, and ever-evolving.
BIO
Renee' C. Baker is a towering figure in multidisciplinary artistry, transcending the boundaries of music, visual art, film, and composition with unparalleled finesse. Her creative journey unfolds like an epic saga, with over 2000 orchestral and chamber ensemble compositions serving as a testament to her boundless imagination and relentless pursuit of innovation.
As the founding music director and conductor of the Chicago Modern Orchestra Project (CMOP), Baker orchestrates a symphony of genres, seamlessly weaving classical elegance with the improvisational spirit of jazz. Her conducting styles, both traditional and gestural, are modes of transformation, conjuring surreal landscapes where sonic and visual realms intertwine in a mesmerizing dance. A true Renaissance artist, Baker's canvas knows no limits as she melds movement, film projections, and sound into a breathtaking tapestry of sensory delight. Her compositions and film scores invite exploration and interpretation, blurring the lines between classicism and experimentation, subjectivity and objectivity.
Baker's influence extends far beyond her compositions. With the same fervor she brings to her craft, she nurtures and cultivates new ensembles. From the Mantra Blue Free Orchestra to the Bleueblue Walkers/Bass Kollektief, her ensembles forge new paths in the ever-evolving landscape of contemporary music.
Baker's most profound legacy lies in her gestural conducting language, CCL/FLOW, a symphony of movements that transcends words, guiding ensembles through her painted score exploratorium pieces. In her hands, music becomes not just a performance but a transcendent experience, a journey into the unknown where every note is a brushstroke.
The formation of WABI HOUSE MEDIA and Relinquish Cinema has resulted in music scores for over 500 silent and 100 experimental films, all with original scores crafted by Baker and the Chicago Modern Orchestra Project.
A visual artist, film artist, composer, and recontextualiser, Baker is a true engineer of multi-disciplines. Layering movement and film projections, she creates an exquisite arena of surrealistic activity within a sonic theatre. Her compositions, crafted with careful construction, allow indeterminacy, experimentalism, classicism, subjectivity, and objective interpretations to coexist. Both performer and audience are cast into unknown roles, inhabiting a temporary environment of limitless potential.
"Exercising Creative Agency"
Renee' C. Baker, PhD.
Artistic Director / Conductor
Chicago Modern Orchestra Project
Modern Black Music Ensemble
Producer- Wabi House Media
Editor- YUGEN Imprint
reneebaker@comcast.net
