At Presentation House Gallery until January 13

There was no seating in the east gallery at Presentation House, so I dragged in a plastic stacking chair. I didn't want to stand there, shifting my weight from foot to foot. I wanted to sit for a while looking at, listening to, and thinking about Tim Lee's dazzling new work, Goldberg Variations: Aria, BWV 988, Johann Sebastian Bach, 1741 (Glenn Gould, 1981).

Lee, one of Vancouver's rising young artists, has established a reputation for reenacting key moments in popular culture. Whether mimicking Steve Martin, Neil Young, or the Beastie Boys, he casts himself as sole performer in his videos and photographs, creating humorous disjunctions between the original and the remake. His peculiar blend of postmodern strategies–appropriation, homage, and incongruity–often links pop culture with aspects of high art, especially with allusions to late modernism and early conceptualism.

A black-and-white video installation with sound, Lee's Goldberg Variations is shown on two large monitors mounted side by side on the wall. The left monitor focuses on his left hand and the right one on his right, while he plays the aria cited in the work's title. Although Lee always performs in his music-referenced artworks, he is not in fact a musician. And he's no match for the genius of Canada's greatest classical-music star, Glenn Gould. Lee's amateurism, however, is part of his conceptual project.

Lee took piano lessons and was coached in his finger placement throughout the recording sessions. His hands were filmed individually, and their sounds and movements were then edited and synchronized to simulate Gould's brilliant version. The resulting jerky visual edits accentuate rather than disguise the stiff-fingered lack of fluency in Lee's performance.

The music and edits allude to Gould's 1981 recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations, not to be confused with his career-making recording of the work in 1955. By 1981, Gould had given up the concert hall for the recording studio, and had begun using what was then cutting-edge technology to construct his second go at the Variations. Phrase by phrase, chord by chord, he cut and pasted it all together into a seamless whole.

Lee's reconstruction, with its intentionally lumpy and bumpy seams, leads us to consider the nature of invention and reinvention, genius and authenticity, high and low art, past and future. As Lee writes in the liner notes to his own little vinyl records of the aria, on display in the gallery, Gould's highly manipulated re-recording of this signature work "effects a rethinking about historical sources–now endlessly pliable and open to new interpretations–and how renditions should allow for a performer's knowledge to come from within".

The second body of work in this show comprises three large photographic self-portraits, a framed magazine, and a series of optical devices mounted in a vitrine. Through them, Lee tries to merge references to himself, American artist Dan Graham, and the 2006 Steve Martin remake of the 1963 movie The Pink Panther. The project falls curiously flat, probably because the connections between the disparate sources are too obscure. Unlike Lee's Goldberg Variations, his Pink Panther works don't compel us to discover why this peculiar juxtaposition could or should make sense. Go for the Gould.