1 post tagged “jeffdeboer.com”

Calgary multimedia artist Jeff de Boer has been creating art since he was a small child, making various metal objects, drawing and painting. After enrolling in the Alberta College of Art and Design 1984, he combined his armour crafting knowledge with his new skills in jewelry to "produce the world's first and only suit of armour for a mouse."

Jeff's major solo exhibition in 1994 entitled "Articulation" featured over one hundred pieces of his work (and boy does this get me excited!) William Gibson wrote the following introduction for it:

There was a Surrealist sculpture called "Object From the Other Side of the Bridge".  I saw it many years ago in an exhibition catalogue.  When I started to write fiction, in 1977 or so, I sometimes imagined I was trying to get hold of objects "from the other side of the bridge".  My writing always seemed to begin with the attempt to describe some imaginary object.  Never with a line of dialogue, a human gesture, a landscape - always with an object, an artifact, some fragment, often broken, of a manufactured world.  I do value dialogue, gesture moves me deeply, landscape as well, but these fragments, these crumbs of imagined technology, are my passport to the other side of the bridge. 

My work, naturally, abounds with them.  The Finn's shop, in Neuromancer, is stacked with them.  The Boxmaker in Count Zero acts out, with them, my idea of what I really do as a novelist.  Slick Henry, in Mona Lisa Overdrive, builds them into monsters, externalizing his own bad dreams.  The bridge in Virtual Light is made of them.  And I'm incapable of passing the window on any junk-shop, the dustier the better, preferably very late at night, without stopping.  Not that I'm looking for anything in particular, any rarity, even oddity, or anything at all to acquire, but because there is sometimes something else there, some eternal lesson, never quite learned, as sublime as the similar lesson taught by beachcombing.  Time is there, distance, mysteries of generation, evidence of migration.  Something sharp, that brings an intake of the breath.  Nothing at all like the sensation of nostalgia, which many people assume is what these places offer.  Something, if I'm lucky, from the other side of the bridge.

And where I least expect to encounter this sensation, I'm sad to say, is in a gallery of contemporary art, particularly in North America.  There are historical reasons for this, I'm sure, although I'm not interested in knowing them.

In this regard, and many others, the art of Jeff de Boer is exceptional.  A poet-craftsman of some utterly singular sensibility - as though a Tiffany or Cartier had somehow been crossed with an oddly sunny version of H.R. Giger - de Boer's jewel-like, exquisitely articulated miniature exo-skeletons, his mutant samurai helms, his Ur-Moderne rocket ships and flying saucers, though rendered with the utmost physical sophistication, possess the purity and innocence of the truest folk art.