Cages: The Paintings of Sandra Chevrier

Sandra Chevrier is an illustrator, painter and street artist living and working in Montreal, Canada. By mixing watercolour paintings and trompe l'oeil comic book collage she crafts beautiful, hyper-realistic mixed-media portraits. Sandra, who calls herself a "gaze collector," creates these hyperrealistic paintings of women in a manner that allows for reinterpretation and recontextualization of the superhero mask. By covering these images with a collage of comic book prints, using scenes from Superman and Batman to conceal the faces of these idealized women, Chevrier discovers new "fragile heroes," promoting the idea that vulnerability often underlies heroism. Titled "Cages," these mixed-media works encourage viewers to consider how the modern woman--like these superheroes--might also be surrounded by expectations of effortless perfection.
Sandra Chevrier is a canadian contemporary / pop urban artist, known for her captivating portraits of women from The Cages series. Born in 1983, Chevrier got her Bachelor's degree in visual and media arts from UQAM - L'Universit du Qu bec Montr al. As a self-taught artist, Sandra Chevrier first fell in love with art as a kid, to her; Art rapidly became a language on its own. At first, she draw sketches of eyes, all the time. This initial obsession is highly visible in her present work. Sandra likes to describe herself as a "gaze collector" and her work; a dichotomy or a dance between power and fragility, freedom and captivity, the poison and the cure. Her work is exhibited internationally and her artworks are now in the collections of art collectors all over the world. Sandra produces work ranging over vastly fluctuating emotional enigmas and concepts that have set the standard of our modern communication, exposing the limitations of our world; our self-imposed expectations and the cages we have allowed to bar us from the fullness of life's experience. With work demanding to be dissected beyond its surface value, Chevrier's portraits are quite literally torn between the fantastical heroics and iconography of comic books and the harsher underlying tragedy of oppressed female identity and the exposed superficial illusion it conveys. In addition to exhibiting a male-dominated world within her 'Cages', Chevrier's subjects denounce the role given to the female counterpart therein, refusing to play the part of seducer or victim. In the greater body of Chevrier's work, the images used within the 'cages' range from scen