Une ligue d’un: Black Testament
The Catacombs
May 5, 2023, to June 3, 2023
Renée Baker
In Une ligue d’un: Black Testament, composer, music director, and artist Renée Baker showcases a surrealist view of the possibilities of black artistry.
This exhibition Une ligue d’un, which translates to “a league of one,” includes large paintings on paper, sculptures, and an experimental film that create unexpected and dramatic entries into the audio-visual arena. Having created a system of visualizing and interpreting musical information and scores, a system she calls CCL (Cipher Conduit Linguistics), there is no distinguishable decision between her visual and audio worlds. This technique uses semantic concepts and gestures of composition to influence the perception of an image as not just an image, but as partner to the chosen score sounds.
Baker’s devotion to recontextualizing boundaries within her work also contains a twist of social détournement, as she addresses the often less-than-honest portrayal of people, especially the lives of African Americans in the 1900s. Listening to and seeing new soundscapes gives the audience a different way to view “otherness,” enacting a form of social justice without overt protest and presenting positive narratives of cultural life without changing a frame.
Her unique juxtaposition of styles, rhythms, and moods creates new meanings in the listeners' relationship with sound art. Reinterpreting, reevaluating, and reimagining the merging of images and sound brings another level of analysis and appreciation. Nothing is easily packaged. Subtle ruptures between imagery and sound achieve an edge of experimentation that drives the images towards a narrative not controlled by either the viewer or the creator. Her intent is to convince the viewer’s mind to marry the two elements and encourage a flow that at first glance appears mismatched but that ultimately creates a comfortable dissonance that allows the viewer to take their interpretation to a new “anywhere” without losing sight of the historical sources that interrogate what lies beneath.
About Renée Baker
Renée Baker is a visual artist, film artist, composer, and recontextualist. She is the founding music director and conductor of the internationally acclaimed Chicago Modern Orchestra Project (CMOP). This polystylistic orchestral organization grew from the plums of classical music and jazz. A member of the world-renowned collective Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), Baker has received critical acclaim for her graphic score novels from performances in Berlin, Poland, London, Scotland, and as far-reaching as Vietnam.
Baker developed the Mantra Blue Free Orchestra (Chicago), PEK’ Contemporary Project (Berlin), and Twilight Struggles (Berlin) as well as being involved in over 20 cutting-edge new music ensembles. Baker was Principal Violist for 24 years of the acclaimed Chicago Sinfonietta. Her conducting language, CCL (Cipher Conduit Linguistics), is an advocate language for linguistic autonomy in sonic graphic scoring. She has composed over 2000 traditionally notated contemporary classical works for ensembles and has written scores for over 220 silent films, as well as crafted 100+ of her own experimental films. Her ability to embrace traditional compositions as well as various creative parameters in her work has led to commissions from the Chicago Sinfonietta, Berlin International Brass, PEK’ Contemporary Project, Joffrey Ballet Chamber Series, Shedd Aquarium, Adler Planetarium, among many others, and she serves as an Artistic Consultant for many classically oriented organizations.
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