Have you seen those viral videos of men experiencing menstrual pain with pain inducing simulators, or men trying to experience the agitation caused by pregnancy by wearing weights on their waist? Did you see how much they struggled with the discomfort, and did you, like me, immediately gave myself a pat on the back for being a woman?
If men can be super heroes, then women are definitely human beings experiencing the challenges that any super heroes need to face on a daily basis. It gets tiring to hear that the current society still holds certain notions on how a woman should be like, instead of respecting women as free flowing individuals, who can achieve whatever she sets her mind on. To fight and express her views on such twisted preconceptions that the society has on women, Montreal-based artist, Sandra Chevrier, has created her series of painting entitled “Cages”.
As a full time single mom, she has gained worldwide success with this collection, where she has created a “dance between reality and imagination, truth and deception”, with her “collage or loose and heavy textures of paint” portraits of women. “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.” She said to Above Second, a Hong Kong gallery who is currently hosting her solo exhibition.
Contrasting the female face with different narratives from a range of superhero content, she has deliberately featured images which are about “conflict, defeat, and triumph”, and uses them as onomatopoeias to charge her works with emotions and story line. Not only do her artworks try to fight against these “cages” that the world has cast upon women, she also raises this idea of how we are all “slaves to something”. The goal of the series is to talk about how it is “a daily struggle for us all against that which is imposed by society and the very expectations we impose on ourselves… We overwork ourselves… We are human, men and women, and we are entitled to the flaw, the error.”
