The Musée national des Beaux-Arts in Québec City will be presenting this fall the long-awaited retrospective of the seminal Canadian artist Evergon, born Albert Jay Lunt in 1946 in Niagara Falls, Ontario. This major exhibition will span his entire career, from 1971 to the present, with a view to shedding contemporary light on the artist’s long-term output. More than 200 works will be assembled for the first time to highlight this colourful individual and his multifaceted work.

Evergon is regarded as a genuine cultural icon in Canada. He is an artistic and social pioneer who focuses on contemporary questions concerning cultural and body diversity and diversity of identity. For nearly 50 years, the artist’s career has centred on bold photographic, technological, and aesthetic research. His always moving and occasionally irreverent striking imagery is often an extension of classical painting. The simultaneously political and sensualistic nature of his work raises questions on sexual orientation. He revisits with rare vitality genres such as portraits, landscapes, or nudes. Through collages, the art of photocopy and an entire array of exploratory photographic approaches, including the Polaroid, Evergon deepens the terms of queer masculine and feminine identity, thereby shaking up fixed ideas.

Numerous striking works underpin Evergon’s career, in particular the immense colour Polaroids from the 1980s, for which he is internationally recognized. Critics and several artistic institutions in the world have also paid tribute to his award-winning work in holography. His series devoted to his mother Margaret renews the representation of the ageing body as few artists have done and has received widespread recognition. Evergon is an immense creative force: identity, body diversity, love, desire, and ageing are at the root of his work. Like death and life, it is the latter in all its facets that the artist celebrates. Evergon grafts on to life notions of autobiographical fiction and extimity, a revelation of the intimate in the public sphere that is common today but that he explored early in his career. The artist deems all his works to be love letters.

Evergon’s concerns encompass social and artistic issues that go beyond the body’s socially constructed limitations. He thus abandons clichés by representing atypical bodies and goes beyond the canons of standardized beauty while relying on the seductive powers of photography, capable of inventing fictional worlds or theatres as is true of another major series in his career, in which he imagines the life of an entire community, that of the characters the Ramboys. Evergon continues to be in perfect synchronicity with the emancipatory challenges of photography: he has forcefully called into question the notion of the author by creating various alter egos. He disrupts the foundations of the photographic image through an astonishing baroque aesthetic and brushes aside the conventional canons of beauty by representing atypical bodies that he invests with panache.

This August 24, 2022, marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of René Lévesque, former Premier of Quebec, undoubtedly the most prominent figure in contemporary Quebec history and the most eminent son of Gaspésie.

 
Among the significant reforms of his government, the LGBT community owes him a great deal for making a major step when sexual orientation was added as a prohibited ground for discrimination to the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms in 1977, a commitment of his party when it was in opposition at the time of its adoption in 1975. Quebec then became the 2nd legislature in the world to ban this discrimination, and this advancement would pave the way for access to equality and make Quebec one of the most welcoming nations in the world for LGBT people.

Born in Campbellton on August 24, 1922, René Lévesque grew up in New Carlisle before continuing his studies in Gaspé and Quebec City. When he dropped out of law school, he turned to radio. Bilingual, he was recruited as a war correspondent by the American army in 1944-45, an experience that deeply impacted him as one of the first correspondents to discover the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps. He then distinguished himself as a journalist in the 1950s, notably for his work on the program "Point de mire". Elected as a Liberal deputy in 1960, he became one of the main architects of the Quiet Revolution.
He was entrusted with the portfolios of Public Works, Hydraulic Resources, and then Natural Resources. He used this position to pilot the electricity nationalization issue at the heart of the 1962 elections. After leaving the Liberal Party, he founded the Sovereignty-Association Movement, and then the Parti Québécois (PQ) in 1968, seeing the political sovereignty of the Quebec people as the natural culmination of the Quiet Revolution. After two defeats in 1970 and 1973, the victory of November 15, 1976, allowed him to form the first PQ government.
A year after rejecting his sovereignty-association project in May 1980, Quebecers returned René Lévesque and the PQ to power in April 1981. He left active politics in 1985. The interest in his memoirs and the reactions to his death in 1987 reflect his unique place in contemporary Quebec history.

Throughout 2022-2023, various events will highlight the centenary of René Lévesque. Those who wish to learn about or remember the unique journey of this significant Premier in Quebec's history should not miss visiting the René-Lévesque Space in his native village of New Carlisle.