
You can usually find Flounder Lee, an assistant professor of photography at IUPUI's Herron School of Art and Design, somewhere around town, either in a classroom or the gallery he co-founded, SpaceCamp MicroGallery. But Lee periodically takes trips far afield — from Alaska to Northern Europe and beyond — to explore the borders that divide nations and peoples from one another.
One standout, an honorable mention, was Flounder Lee's "United States 1919 in Colon." This work, which juxtaposed an old U.S. map over a grid of photographs taken at the former site of the School of the Americas, acknowledged a fraught historical context.
Curator Flounder Lee was once an aerospace engineer at the University of Alabama, before becoming an assistant professor of photography at Herron. According to Lee, he left aerospace engineering because it was too heavy on economics and not theoretical enough. The work of the three artists featured in Aerospacial reflects the curator’s hot and cold relationship with aerospace engineering. Sam Davis exhibits panoramic photos which depict astronauts acting like the Beat Generation…McLean Fahnestock’s video piece “Grande Finale” emphasizes the legacy of enduring images from the space program's launches… Darren Hostetter departs from the space motif and presents paintings of bombers and drones arranged into snowflakes, kaleidoscope projections and textile patterns…One hesitates to call the show a loving memorial to aerospace engineering; instead it forces us to ponder its central purpose, its legacy and its place in the natural order.
If you saw the performers getting tangled in the webs of yarn spanning the hallway outside SpaceCamp on First Friday evening, Feb. 4, you might've thought of spiders. This was, in fact, a site-specific installation/performance with a serious purpose (entitled "Maps, Networks, and Nodes"). Inside the gallery, the most interesting installation was Derrek Curry and Jennifer Gradecki's "Biofeedback Loop," in which participants got to see a live sex performance in return for having their facial reactions recorded and their stress levels measured. All you got to see, however, were their facial reactions on TV and the record book containing their resulting stress levels! Such performance "byproducts" were the unifying theme of this show, which certainly seemed clever enough.
Flounder Lee, who teaches photography at Herron School of Art and lives in Fletcher Place, was one of the 11 artists on site Saturday. "I don't get to do a lot of 3-D stuff, and I liked the idea of the challenge of only using something that's there," Lee said. Lee picked up pieces of broken dishes, left from Test's home that has since been demolished, and planned to create a sound installation using the dish pieces against a 55-gallon barrel he found on the grounds.--Gretchen Becker
It’s not a mystery at all about how the American Indians lost their land and Flounder Lee illustrates this process in the video loop with toy soldiers and a map in “Tribal Treaties 1785-1894” with piles of blue toy soldiers steadily overtaking yellow ones on a map of the U.S. in a video loop. He effectively hits the mark here in showing how promises once made by the U.S. were so easily broken under the pressure of westward immigration.-Dan Grossman
Nuvo Cover Story and Astronaut Article Both as a PDF
Chopped and Stretched As a PDF
Aerospacial in Nuvo As a PDF
TPS Reports in Nuvo As a PDF
Barcelona Art Contemporani Schedule as PDF and the Flier
Indianapolis Star-Test Fest, October 21, 2010 As a PDF
Test Fest Art of the Matter MP3
Schneider Museum of Art as a PDF
Hedonist on RTV Serbia Part One and Part Two
On the Cusp-One Performative Night As a PDF
Turbulence-Low Lives As a PDF
Absolute Arts-Interview with Flounder Lee As a PDF
Nuvo-Mind the Gap As a PDF
On the Cusp-Interview: Flounder Lee As a PDF
Cartophilia: Look and Listen As a PDF
Cartophilia: Flounder Lee As a PDF
The Map Room: Flounder Lee As a PDF