#lesperance

[rickchung]

Seeking Mavis Beacon (dir. Jazmin Jones) x DOXA 2024. (via The Independent)

Two women investigate the disappearance of the iconic real-life model behind the popular 1980s educational software while raising pertinent issues concerning our relationship to technology. Jones and her friend, Carribean-American video artist Olivia McKayla Ross, create their own portrait of their image of "Mavis Beacon" while blending the facts they uncover with their own fictional interpretations. Their exercise feels like an experimental detour interrogating our cultural fascinations (like true crime or conspiratorial fare) as they figure out who Renee L’Esperance, a Haitian immigrant model, perfume saleswoman, and the face behind Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, really is and why she vanished from public life entirely.

Screening as part of the 2024 DOXA Documentary Film Festival at The Cinematheque on May 12.

[good-books-to-read]

Travel Destination: Norway

The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

Finnmark, Norway, 1617. 20 year old Maren watches the sea and the sky break into a sudden violent storm, All forty of the village’s men were at sea, including Maren’s father and brother, and all forty are drowned in the otherworldly disaster.

For the women left behind, survival means defying the strict rules of the island. They fish, hunt, and butcher reindeer—which they never did while the men were alive. However this cannot last with the arrival of Absalom Cornet, a man sent from Scotland to root out alleged witchcraft with his pretty young wife Ursa.

The Wide Starlight by Nicole Lesperance

According to Arctic lore, if you whistle at the Northern Lights, they'll swoop down and carry you off forever. Sixteen-year-old Eline Davis knows it's true because it happened to her mother. Eli was there that night on the remote glacier in Svalbard, when her mother whistled, then vanished.

Years later, Eli is living with her father when she learns the northern lights will be visible for one night and hatches a plan to find her mother. And it works. Her mother arrives with a hazy story of where she's been all this time. Eli knows no one will believe them, so she keeps it all a secret. But when magical, dangerous things start happening, it becomes too much for Eli, pushing her mother away not expecting her to disappear as abruptly as she appeared. Her mother gone again, Eli's devastated. Until she finds the note written in mother's elegant scrawl: Find me where I left you. And so, off to Svalbard Eli goes.

Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett

Emily Wilde is a professor studying faeries in a remote village of Hrafnsvik to finish up her encyclopaedia, however it doesn’t go to plan with villagers vanishing, the town snubbing her and her annoying colleague Wendell Bambleby who just decided to show up and get in the way.

But as Emily gets closer and closer to uncovering the secrets of the Hidden Ones—the most elusive of all faeries—lurking in the shadowy forest outside the town, she also finds herself on the trail of another mystery: Who is Wendell Bambleby, and what does he really want?

The Reckless Kind by Carly Heath

It's 1904 on an island just west of Norway, and Asta Hedstrom doesn't want to marry her odious betrothed, Nils. But her mother believes she should be grateful for the possibility of any domestic future, given her single-sided deafness, unconventional appearance, and even stranger notions. Asta would rather spend her life performing in the village theater with her fellow outcasts: her best friend Gunnar Fuglestad and his secret boyfriend, wealthy Erlend Fournier.

Shunning marriage for good, Asta moves with Gunnar and Erlend to their secluded cabin above town. With few ties left to their families, they have one shot at gaining enough money to secure their way of life: win the village's annual horse race, if only it was that easy.

The Twisted Tree by Rachel Burge

Martha can tell things about a person just by touching their clothes, as if their emotions and memories have been absorbed into the material. It started the day she fell from the tree at her grandma's cabin and became blind in one eye.

Determined to understand her strange ability, Martha sets off to visit her grandmother, Mormor - only to discover Mormor is dead, a peculiar boy is in her cabin instead and a terrifying creature is on the loose.

[mentaltimetraveller]

Ellen Lesperance, Fighting Amazon (Throwing Urn), 2014, pigmented slip on terracotta, compost-dyed silk, 30.4 x 11.4 x 11.4 cm

[queenofthemasquerade]

Harem Scarem - No Justice

[bookcoversonly]

Title: The Depths | Author: Nicole Lesperance | Publisher: Razorbill (2022)

[aliceliawitch]

Giuseppe Arcimboldo

Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526/1527-1593) Oil on canvas "Autumn" (1573) Located in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, France

[sammystruggles]

“There is a video on the internet of me dying and I can’t stop watching it.”

The Depths by Nicole Lesperance 4/5 stars

Trigger warnings: Death/thoughts of death, drowning, child death, lots of bugs. 

This book sucked me in from the very first line.  “There is a video on the internet of me dying and I can’t stop watching it.” Like girl WHAT??

After literally dying and having the video posted on the internet for all to see, Addie is dragged on her mom and step dad’s honeymoon as they are worried about leaving her alone. On Eulalie Island, she meets two boys, Billy and Shawn, and becomes fast friends with both. but the island is weird. The birds are calling her name, she starts sleepwalking, and she finds a little girl who wants to play hide and seek but is… dead… 

The atmosphere of this book was so immersive. The island was so creepy with how things changed and reacted to Addie. When the birds started making sounds that were clearly Addie’s name, that should have been the sign for her to LEAVE but alas, for the plot we stuck around.

I really liked Addie and Billy's friendship and how they both loved Violet and wanted to help her reunite with her sister. SPEAKING OF THOSE TWO, the story of Violet and Lenora was heartbreaking from the way they died to the way they were trapped on the island.

I enjoyed this book a lot and definitely recommend it!

[between-the-pages657]

Yep. This pulled a “He was a ghost the whole time!!!”

But I don’t hate it like I did with Winterwood.

[diminutoatelier]

[videomessiah]

Harem Scarem - Blue

[diminutoatelierambulante]

[fashionbooksmilano]

Woven Histories

Textiles and Modern Abstraction

Production by Brad Ireland and Christina Wiginton, Editing by Magda Nakassis,

National Gallery of Art, Washington copublished by The University of Chicago Press, 2023, 284 pages, ISBN 978-0-226-82729-2

euro 65,00

email if you want to buy booksinprogressmilano@yahoo.it

Exhibition dates : Los Angeles County Museum Art 2023, Washington Nat.Gall.Art 2024, Ottawa Nat.Gall.Canada 2024,New York MoMA 2025

Richly illustrated volume exploring the inseparable histories of modernist abstraction and twentieth-century textiles.   Published on the occasion of an exhibition curated by Lynne Cooke, Woven Histories offers a fresh and authoritative look at textiles—particularly weaving—as a major force in the evolution of abstraction. This richly illustrated volume features more than fifty creators whose work crosses divisions and hierarchies formerly segregating the fine arts from the applied arts and handicrafts.   Woven Histories begins in the early twentieth century, rooting the abstract art of Sophie Taeuber-Arp in the applied arts and handicrafts, then features the interdisciplinary practices of Anni Albers, Sonia Delaunay, Liubov Popova, Varvara Stepanova, and others who sought to effect social change through fabrics for furnishings and apparel. Over the century, the intersection of textiles and abstraction engaged artists from Ed Rossbach, Kay Sekimachi, Ruth Asawa, Lenore Tawney, and Sheila Hicks to Rosemarie Trockel, Ellen Lesperance, Jeffrey Gibson, Igshaan Adams, and Liz Collins, whose textile-based works continue to shape this discourse. Including essays by distinguished art historians as well as reflections from contemporary artists, this ambitious project traces the intertwined histories of textiles and abstraction as vehicles through which artists probe urgent issues of our time.

24/12/23

[emiliosandozsequence]

house of the dragon (2022-present) cr. george r.r. martin & ryan condal / ouroboricism, alice lesperance

[adamfaulknerstanheight]

first reformed (2018) dir. paul schrader // every day for the rest of your life, maggie siebert // pictures for sad children, simone veil // untitled, junkworldusa // ouroboricisms, alice lesperance // self hate, emikkzo // adult world (i), david foster wallace // non-canon, tom mchenry // free bird, ajj

[bookcoversonly]

Title: The Nightmare Thief | Author: Nicole Lesperance | Publisher: Sourcebooks Young Readers (2021)