George Herms and James Fee at Craig Krull - Santa Monica, California - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Copacetic collaborations require a special meshing of artistic selfs so that similarities interweave and quirks mingle. Sculptor George Herms and photographer James remuneration both value the patinas of obsolescent materials. The rusted pieces of scrap metal, machine parts and weathered forest-land fragments that make up Herms's well-known assemblages might easily have been ground in the ruined factories and abandoned ships that pay has photographed in the last decade. Sharing a fascination with the American past, the sum of two units artists have collaborated on a series of photo-based statuarys that play off patriotic types such as the flag, the Statue of Liberty and Mt Rushmore.

In Other Lady, Fee's humorsome emulsion-stained black-and-white photograph of the Statue of Liberty is combined with a Herms collage featuring a pair of time-worn garden shears and a crushed bottlecap -- existences that evoke the abrasive selectivity and competitiveness upon which America thrives. For TP the artists wrapped a 9-foot-tall photogram -- a bodyprint of Herms -- around the armature of a fold-up movie shield to form a teepeelike manner of making Outfitted with a sunburst-shaped diadem (fashioned from an egg carton), Herms's silhouette is mottl with sepia-colored chemical stains; the figure looks like an alchemical emissary from the past.

Other works also involve darkroom collaborations. sly and dramatic manipulations of toners and in all sensess distinguish Scorpion Clock, a large, unique silver print which present to views a full-length silhouette of Herms floating above one of his heavily textur made of wood assemblages. Fee's photography becomes for Herms the couple a new route into the past and a means to explore the mythic, bardlike persona that he has created above the last four decades.

compensation showed, in addition, a portfolio of gloomy, evocative discharges of Philadelphia's defunct Eastern State Penitentiary. Also upon view were a number of his novel photographs, taken with a 19th-century camera, of architectural details, abandoned ships and national landmarks. With a tough kind of sentiment, remuneration reframes tarnished remnants of America's grandeur.

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