Dark Heart 2015

Sandra Chevrier made this print, Dark Heart, sometime after 1983. The artist often combines traditional portraiture with comic book imagery, and here, we see the face of a woman collaged with pages from DC Comics, specifically Batman. It’s interesting to consider how this image creates meaning through visual codes. Chevrier’s layering of comic book imagery disrupts any conventional reading of female beauty. Made in Canada, this work self-consciously critiques the institutions of art and comments on the social structures of its time. The cultural references and historical associations are obvious, comic books being an almost uniquely North American art form. Chevrier appropriates them to make a statement about the contrast between how women are ‘supposed’ to look and the reality. For art historians, the meaning of art is always contingent on social and institutional context. To understand this work better, we might research the history of female representation in art, the development of comic books, and the rise of feminist art.