At the Contemporary Art Gallery until January 14, 2007

There’s something delightfully perverse about Euan Macdonald’s approach to art-making. At the Contemporary Art Gallery, his low-key contrariness delivers itself in a film projection, a sculptural installation, and a small book, each in its way refusing the viewer access to a tidy ending, a place of resolution. Questions are posed, existential dilemmas are stirred up, firm answers are denied. Kind of like life.

Macdonald, who is based in Los Angeles, was born in Scotland and spent some of his youth in Canada, including stints at art schools in Calgary and Toronto. The shape of his practice is equally diffuse. You Are My Nebula is a 16mm film projected onto a freestanding screen with a tripodal base, placed in the middle of a darkened gallery. Both the screen and the projector, with its clicks and hums, are curiously retro objects, reminiscent of the home movies and classroom presentations that occurred before video.

Yet it’s significant that the equipment used is so outdated in comparison with the nature of the image being projected: a fan-shaped cloud of brilliant light at the centre of the Orion nebula. Despite the fact that present-day digital-imaging and electronic-telescope technologies would allow us to view and record this phenomenon in great detail and rich colour, Macdonald has chosen to downgrade his borrowed imagery to low-resolution black and white. In the exhibition brochure, curator Jenifer Papararo suggests that this use of “antiquated technology” accords with a more nostalgic, personal, and quirky experience of astronomy, as if we were using the naked eye or perhaps a pair of binoculars to gather impressions of the night sky. How long the light has taken to get from there to here is merely one wonder in contemplating the awesome vastness and ultimately incomprehensible origins of the universe.

Macdonald’s small artist’s book You Are My Nebula/You Are My Sunshine is published by the CAG and brings together two short but charming essays, one about the Orion nebula by amateur astronomer Shevill Mathers and the other about the musical saw by amateur historian Bill Bingham. The mating of these diverse texts (one is upside down and both align in concentric spirals at the middle of the book) is explained not with respect to subject matter (what would a spectacular cloud of particles and gases in which new stars are being formed have in common with a humble folk instrument?) but in the anecdotal and personable tone with which they are written. Each text is accompanied by little drawings and photographs, charming and low-res.

Perhaps most perverse here is Macdonald’s Mosquito Under a Paper Cup in Vancouver, the title an allusion to a phrase used by Bingham to describe the sound of the musical saw. The installation consists of a plain wooden table on which are placed 23 upended white paper cups in seemingly random formation. One of the cups covers a gold, life-size replica of a mosquito. In this particular shell game, however, the viewer is not allowed to find out which. There’s no sleight-of-hand artist behind the table, and signs posted nearby read Please Do Not Touch.

Macdonald intentionally thwarts our expectations. Nobody messes with the installation, the mosquito is never revealed, and we are left in a state of frustrated uncertainty. Perhaps there’s no mosquito there at all. Perhaps life has no meaning. Perhaps.