La cage à l'unisson, 2020

Sandra Chevrier   Emerging artists

Sandra Chevrier is a Canadian contemporary artist known for her captivating collaged portraits of women in the series The Cages. Born in 1983, Chevrier received her Bachelor of Visual and Media Arts from UQAM - Université du Québec à Montréal. As a self-taught artist, Sandra Chevrier first fell in love with art as a child, expressing her emotions through pencil drawing . At first, she drew sketches of eyes all the time. This initial passion is very visible in her current work. Sandra likes to describe herself as a "collector of looks," as she believes that one can read all of a human being's emotions just by looking into their eyes.

The works in Sandra Chevrier's The Cages series are created with a strong message of social freedom and open-mindedness imbued in the canvas. The series was born from the fusion of painting and collage, as Chevrier uses paint and real comic book clippings to create intense mixed-media portraits of women. Sandra worked in a truly controlled and hyper-realistic manner before discovering collage and mixed media. Today, Chevrier's work is a self-directed and supremely fabricated blend of fine art and street art.

The Cages series tells the story of women trying to free themselves from the cages imposed by society's distorted prejudices and expectations of what a woman should or should not be, of false beauty and perfection. With bold colors and graphic lines, the artist uses loose and heavy paint textures that make her depicted subjects appear to emerge from the surreal world within the canvas, revealing the underlying tragedy of oppressed female identity. By using comics as a mask for her depicted heroines, Chevrier highlights the fragility of the superhero, their weaknesses and personal flaws, and exposes the humanity within the superhuman.