According to the Jeff de Boer, the finish on this work was inspired by a similar texture he saw on a samurai helmet in the collection of the Glenbow Museum. The shape and articulation are reminiscent of the tails of de Boer’s armoured mice. The theme behind the Exoform series, is biological armour across time: past, present and future. The artist writes:
“…the Exoforms swallow up the presumed linearity of time wholesale, undercutting its serial progressions and chronological fixations. de Boer Standard Time becomes less fixed by the tides than by the crosscurrents, eddies and whirlpools. Bored with conventional time, he has both damned it up and let it rush, flowing into and over itself in all directions. A dynamic and fluid flux flows around geological inertia.
Within this sumultaneity, the Exoforms thrive on paradox. Neither human nor mechanical, nor crustacean, they cross trilobite with starship, space alien and helmet. It is possible that the forms exist merely as a way station somewhere between all of this, purposefully without individual titles, without period, without precise context. Any sense of identity shifts with every viewing.”
Reference: “Jeff de Boer: Articulation” (Jeff de Boer; Muttart Public Art Gallery; 1994″
