Sandra Chevier

Over the years, society has changed its love for things; one thing, however, that hasn’t seemed to change is a persons love for action figures, especially mine. While exploring the world of comic book art, I found an artist who uses comic books themselves as a main aspect and focal point of her work in a unique and interesting way, to help convey a variety of messages.

Sandra Chevier is an artist who lives in Montreal, Quebec, who is an idea chaser and gaze collector. Chevier is an illustrator and painter who creates work with a powerful message seen around the globe. He work is shown in Canada, as well and in the United States, United Kingdom, Europe and Asia, and is expanding due to her series “Super Hero Cages”, allowing her art to be in the hands of collectors all over from Europe, USA, Netherlands, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, Russia and more. She creates strange and dramatic portraits by adding various comic book pages and action figures collages to water-coloured features. These images are placed in a fresh context, all taking on a new visual significance, allowing each piece to carry its own meaning, reflecting a powerful message of social freedom and emotions, to symbolize the strength in women, or some to depict wild haired women immersed in their fantasies of pop culture.

“A dance between reality and imagination, truth and deception.”

Her recent series “Super Hero Cages” has spread widely. Chevier says it is about, “women trying to find freedom from society’s twisted preconceptions of what a woman should or shouldn’t be. These women encased in these cages of brash imposing paint or comic books that masks their very person symbolizes the struggle that women go through with having these false expectations of beauty and perfection as well as the limitations society places on women, corrupting what truly is beautiful by placing women in these prisons of identity. By doing so, society is asking them to become superheroes.” This series, as well as many others is driven by her way of language. She wants to use art as a way to express her feelings of something that is held inside. Instead of confining in a diary as a release, she puts her words and feelings onto canvas to say how she feels.

The subjects itself are always women; she wants her work to show the “cages” that women are trapped in, how their true identities are masked and to symbolize the struggle that women go through on a daily basis. Women are trapped with high expectations of false beauty and perfection, and are forced by the limitations placed upon them by the surrounding culture and society. Her work is ment to show the corruption of our perception of beauty and what it has become; how our modern concept is so altered and distorted that we fail to see the true beauty that makes a woman themselves by putting them in these “prisons of identity”. Her creation process begins with the eyes. As said above, she is a gaze collector. The meaning to this is, in her work, the eyes have the most detail in them. She feels that you can read all the emotions in a human being by just looking into their eyes, and finding a model for her piece is taxing, as they have to have the exact gaze she’s looking for; they need to be able to tell a story with just one look. As a whole she uses collage or loose and heavy textures of paint that make the women captured to seem as if their emerging from the surreal world within their painted canvas. She is always looking for mistakes, and to evolve these mistakes into something more. With out this, this theme of comic book covered women never would have happened, as it was an accident. By taking these experimental mistakes, she can evolve and create something new and powerful, and if it fails, one learns from it.