Ministry -Sandra Chevrier – La Cage. Je n’ai pas peur

Sandra Chevrier – La Cage. Je n’ai pas peur

Sandra Chevrier is a Canadian contemporary artist known for her captivating collage portraits of women from the series The Cages. Chevrier, born 1983, holds a bachelor’s degree in Fine and Media Arts from UQAM – The Université du Québec à Montréal. As an self-taught artist, Sandra Chevrier first fell in love with art as a child. Moreover, she expressed her emotions through pencil drawings. At first she drew sketches of eyes again and again. This early passion is clearly visible in her current work.

Chevrier can remember a concrete moment that made her realize that she wanted to be an artist. As a teenager, she visited a gallery in Montreal, where she saw a picture that strongly influenced her. The painting was Detritus Of Devotion, by Canadian artist Heidi Taillefer. When Sandra felt a strong rush of emotion, she realized that she had a desire to convey the same feeling to people as she looked at some of her own creations.

Her work:

The works from Sandra Chevrier’s The Cages series are created with a strong message of social freedom and an open mind. The series is the result of a fusion of painting and collage. Mainly Chevrier uses color and contemporary comic strips to create intense mixed-media portraits of women. Before the discovery of collages and mixed media, Sandra worked in a truly controlled and hyper-realistic manner. Today, Chevrier’s work is a mixture of visual and street art, both self-managed and executed to the highest standards of craftsmanship.

The Cages series tells a story of women trying to free themselves from the imposed cages of society’s distorted prejudices. Also, society’s expectations of what a woman should or shouldn’t be, of false beauty and perfection. With sharp colors and graphic lines, the artist uses loose and heavy color textures that seem to let her portrayed motifs emerge from the surreal world on canvas. They reveal the underlying tragedy of the oppressed female identity. By using comics as masks for her heroines, Chevrier emphasizes the fragility of the superhero. His personal weaknesses and mistakes expose humanity to the superhuman.

Exhibitions:

Sandra Chevrier took part in the Nuart Festival in 2015 as a selected artist to launch the Art Billboard project. A new project whose main goal is to give contemporary artists the opportunity to work outside their comfort zone, on the scale of street art in public space. Sandra Chevrier has exhibited her work mainly in Canada. Furthermore, she has exhibited in San Francisco and Los Angeles, UK, throughout Europe and Asia. The most successful series to date – The Cages, achieves worldwide success. Her artworks are now in the collections of art collectors around the world – Europe, USA, Japan, Australia, Russia and many more.

Sandra Chevrier currently lives in Montreal, Quebec, where she works in a home studio.