Sandra Chevrier
Sandra Chevrier is a Canadian contemporary/pop urban artist, known for her captivating portraits of women from The Cages series. Born in 1983, Chevrier earned her Bachelor’s degree in visual and media arts from UQAM – L’Université du Québec à Montréal. As a self-taught artist, Sandra Chevrier first fell in love with art as a child; for her, art rapidly became a language of its own. At first, she drew 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 as 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.
About the art
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 scenes of
conflict, triumph and defeat. They also represent the social limitations, which
corrupt what truly is beautiful and lock women into prisons of highly-codified
and narrow identities. By doing so, they are asked to become nothing short of
superheroines. Sandra paints masterfully detailed portraiture, making her
women seemingly emerge from a surreal world, onto the canvas, wherein a
dance is performed between reality and imagination, truth and
deception.The artist chooses to highlight the fragility of the superhero, their
struggles and weaknesses, and exposes the humanity within the superhuman.
Despite all the playfulness of the thing itself and all the “CRASH BAM
POW,” superheroes are also fragile. We are merely human men and women,
and we are entitled to our flaws and errors.
