Lara Mimosa Montes / The Time of the Novel

Please join us at Dreamsong for a book launch, screening, and conversation to celebrate Lara Mimosa Montes's The Time of the Novel, out this month from Wendy’s Subway.

Spellbinding. Reads like a thriller, thinks like a philosopher, and enchants like a poet of the first order. Reality is now permanently warped because this book exists. — Paul Chan

The evening will include a special screening of a suite of Bas Jan Ader's (1942–1975) short films, as we approach the fiftieth anniversary of the artist's In search of the miraculous (1975), a triptych he had set out to complete the second part when he set off to cross the Atlantic in a small sailboat and was lost at sea.

A conversation with Patricia Ledesma Villon, Assistant Curator of Moving Image at Walker Art Center, will follow, to reflect on metafictional journeys in pursuit of the edge of a literary horizon; the ever-elusive boundaries between art and real life, the real and the written; and Ader's unparalleled impact on the worlds of contemporary art and literature.

Books will be available for sale courtesy of Moon Palace Books. Films copyright the Estate of Bas Jan Ader/ Mary Sue Ader Andersen, 2025/ The Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York. Co-organized with Wendy's Subway.

Bios

Lara Mimosa Montes is a writer, editor, and teaching artist whose practice and experiences span the fields of alternative publishing and experimental writing. She is the author of THRESHOLES (2020) and The Somnambulist (2016). Her writing has appeared in BOMB, Fence, The Brooklyn Rail, The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of artist residencies and fellowships from MacDowell, Marble House Project, Jentel, and Headlands Center for the Arts. She is a faculty member of the Creative Writing MFA program at Pacific Northwest College of Art. She also teaches in XE: Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement Master’s program at NYU. She was born in the Bronx.

Patricia Ledesma Villon is a curator, moving image archivist, and researcher born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is Assistant Curator of Moving Image at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Since 2019, she has been a member and co-organizer of Light Field, an annual exhibition of recent and historical moving image art on film. Her writing appears in Cinergie — Il Cinema e le altre Arti, The Moving Image, and is forthcoming in Synoptique: Journal of Moving Image Studies. She also serves on the Board of Directors of Canyon Cinema Foundation, a historic distributor of experimental, avant-garde, and artist-made films.