Beatroute Magazine BC Print Edition - July 2017

FESTIVAL D’ETE
DE QUEBEC
Quebec City summer festival celebrates 50 years
CLAUDE MONET’S SECRET GARDEN
seminal French painter blooms again in significant exhibition
KATHRYN HELMORE
CITY
GLENN ALDERSON
Quebec City is celebrating 50 years of Festival d'été
de Québec (FEQ) this year and with that comes one
of their biggest and most legendary lineups to date.
With acts like Metallica, Gorillaz, The Who and Kendrick
Lamar leading the charge, as always there is
something for everyone gracing stages all throughout
the city from July 6 to 16.
Each year over the course of ten days, the festival
consumes the city with its main stage events
sprawled across the historic Plains of Abraham, a
once legendary battleground where the English defeated
the French in the Seven Year War of 1759. This
year, the only battling will be between the sounds of
James Hetfield’s fully cranked distortion and the earbuds
of the expected 10,000+ people on the main
site when Metallica takes the stage Friday July 14.
With 135,000 passes sold at a reasonable price
($95/pass) so as not to leave anyone without an opportunity
to participate, the festival just announced
they are completely sold out of passes this year,
which should be of no surprise to anyone, considering
the positive relationship that the festival has
fostered and maintained with both tourists and the
people of Quebec City.
“The relationship between the festival and the
people from Québec is kind of unique,” says communications
director Luci Tremblay. “Québec citizens
have a strong feeling of belonging towards the
FEQ and they’re proud of it. They’ve been coming for
many years — with their parents when they were
younger, and now their kids and even their grandkids
are enjoying it!”
Festival d'été de Québec truly is a festival unlike
anything else with a good mix of Franco and Anglophone
culture, both locally and internationally acclaimed.
For more information about the lineup and
how you can bare witness to the endless
amount of entertainment that happens
each summer throughout beautiful Quebec
City, visit www.infofestival.com.
photo by Andre Olivier Lyra
FEQ celebrates 50 years with a legendary lineup of artists.
With Claude Monet’s Secret Garden, the Vancouver
Art Gallery is inviting the public to fall in
love again with the art that helped define modern
painting.
“Monet is one of the most important European
artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries,”
says senior curator Ian Thom. “His work has been
widely influential and allows us to see the world in
a novel manner, quite unlike the academic art of
the 19th century.”
Monet is known for being foremost in a party
of painters who fled the confined and dark
studio for the great outdoors. His work is more
concerned with light than subjects, and his brush
strokes aim to capture energy, not detail. Inspired
by a passion for the beauty of nature, Monet
does not bother with the trials and tribulations
of mankind.
The exhibition, which features 38 paintings
sourced from the Musée Marmottan Monet in
Paris, opens with “En promenade près d’Argenteuil”
— an 1875 painting that wistfully depicts
Monet’s wife and son walking through a field of
bloomed flowers. The exhibition concludes with
work inspired by Monet’s home and garden in
Giverny, France. His famous Water Lilies series are
part of this period.
“The ‘Nymphéas’ [Water Lilies] are my favourite
pieces,” says Thom. “I like the fact that the
image seems to hover between representation
and abstraction. I admire the boldness of his
ELAD LASSRY
artist’s work challenges perception, comfort
photo courtesy of 303 Gallery
Multi-faceted artist shows the displeasure in simplicity.
Vancouver Art Gallery exhibit celebrates seminal Monet works.
KATHRYN HELMORE
Elad Lassry. His artwork is like a bottle
of lukewarm water on a hot, dry day. It’s
like the first two seconds of your favourite
song, turned off before the rhythm
begins. In other words, the works of this
Los Angeles-based artist can be uncomfortable
and frustrating. But this is not an
insult. In fact, Lassry specializes in making
his audience feel dissatisfied, thirsty, and
subtly unsettled.
“Lassry has been called ‘a new kind of
conceptual photographer,’” says Mandy
Ginson, a curatorial assistant at the Vancouver
Art Gallery, where Tel Aviv-born
Lassry’s first major exhibition in North
America is being shown. “He is among a
generation of artists whose work is concerned
with how pictures communicate
and how we perceive different kinds of
images.”
Over the last decade, Lassry has produced
an extensive body of work in mediums
including photograph, film, and
sculpture. Yet to categorize Lassry is tricky.
He isn’t a photographer, a filmmaker, or a
master of sculpture. His small pieces, generally
8 by 11 inches, are carefully staged
photographs of average things, from people
to animals to household objects, such
as nail polish. He also frequently alters photos
sourced from magazines and archives.
photo by Bridgeman Giraudon
brush work; an apparently incoherent network
of brushstrokes coalesces into an encompassing
vista which daringly eschews conventions of composition.”
Organizing an exhibition of this prestige was an
undertaking and the event has been in the works
for over five years. “Part of the role of the Vancouver
Art Gallery is to bring great art to Vancouver,”
says Thom. “We are pleased to be able to show
Monet’s work in a scale and depth that has never
been seen in Western Canada before.”
Claude Monet’s Secret Garden runs at the
Vancouver Art Gallery until October 1.
“Lassry very purposefully uses types of
images that are simple and familiar, images
that might resemble fashion photography
or product shots for example,” says
Ginson. “He makes subtle changes, so that
they become strange and prompt us to go
back, look again, and maybe engage with
the image in a different way.”
“Untitled (Green)” embodies Lassry's
unique approach to photography. The
photograph is simple: a woman sitting
against a plain, green backdrop. Based on
her posture and her crocheted dress, she
looks like a vintage pin up girl. Who the
woman really is, we’ll never know — the
core components of identification, her
body and face, are blocked by a single vertical
strip of foil.
“What I like about ‘Untitled (Green)’
is how the gesture is so simple,” says Ginson.
“The single line drawn though the
middle of the image makes the piece and
our experience of viewing it compellingly
strange and complex.”
A survey of Elad Lassry’s work runs
at the Vancouver Art Gallery until
October 1.
July 2017 CITY
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