Judging from his resume, multi-media artist Euan Macdonald has never created anything quite like the 20 x 50 foot mountain that all-but-overflows the main exhibition space at Western Bridge, his biggest and most ambitious installation to date.  Commissioned by patrons Bill and Ruth True, the snow-covered precipice offers a series of dramatic perspectives as the viewer encounters it from different viewpoints. 

Walking alongside we experience the mountain as a threatening cliff, sheer and leaning over us as it rises; one is reminded of strolling beside the similarly imposing steel walls of Richard Serra’s Wake at the Olympic Sculpture Park, where the effect is macho-industrial, rather than faux-alpine.

A very different moment occurs when we leave the main gallery and look back; filling what is normally a broad, open entranceway is a view of nothing but snow, as though the ice age had arrived and set up housekeeping  in the parlor.Finally, we mount stairs to the balcony, where we find ourselves unexpectedly eye-to-eye with a staring mountain goat, its gaze either plaintive or quizzical, depending on one’s interpretation. 

Interpretation, in fact, is a tricky issue with Macdonald’s mountain, since it is so deadpan as a statement.  It is not didactic, or distressing, or particularly humorous, and it’s not meant to remind us of anything; it’s just odd and out of place and entertaining – a spectacle.  And it’s consistent with the bulk of the other works on view; Macdonald’s specialty is the odd juxtaposition of the man-made and the natural environment, colliding in incongruous and amusing ways. If we can’t quite figure out the point of the indoor mountain, we don’t really mind. Like many of his contemporaries, Macdonald sees the environmental sky as falling, but he is calm about it, almost bemused, choosing a mood of irony rather than Armageddon, and using his skills as an object maker to keep us interested, if not enlightened.

Macdonald’s pictorial skills are abundantly evident in the series entitled World Reversal, twelve ink drawings of the gradual demise of a gleaming cruise ship as the waters of the world recede, the sort of epic catastrophe that contemporary Hollywood celebrates for its shock value.  Unlike Tinseltown, Macdonald keeps his narrative low-key: his white ocean liner subtly discolors as the ocean level drops from panel to panel, then more quickly begins to rust and disintegrate as it is deposited on the now-dry ocean floor.  The hull crumbles, plants disappear, and nothing is left but desert and sky.   Macdonald has an appealing visual imagination, and his descriptive language is spontaneous, clear, and concise; he tweaks the viewer by arranging the sequence in backwards order, so that we might read it either from dry-to-wet or wet-to-dry; not good news in either direction.  A similar sardonic take on the demise of civilization as we know it is a depiction of Toronto’s CN Tower buried in layers of geological deposits with only the last few feet of its radio mast poking above the ground.  I’m told that the piece is a study for a sculpture the artist actually installed in the city in question, with the exposed mast suggesting the rest of the tower underneath. 

The most engaging work in the exhibition is a spectacular installation called Selected Standards, which entirely fills the large rearmost space of the gallery previously reserved for media displays.  Inspired by a set of sheet music Macdonald purchased at a junk store in LA, the work features 84 framed musical title pages paired with framed drawings and black and white photographs suggested by the musical piece in question.  The music itself is a familiar sampling of vintage pop songs of mid-century America, whose various themes of concocted, romantic love and moody reminiscence Macdonald contrasts (mostly) with gritty views of modern Los Angeles.  To further set the scene, the tunes themselves are heard in the background, thanks to  a video which features an off-screen pianist playing a few seconds of each piece, while the covers are displayed in close-up like the quickly-changing titles in a silent movie. 

So we drift about, lulled by the sort of melodies we associate with Perry Como and tinkling cocktail glasses, considering pairings that are in turn mysterious, amusing, ironic, or sad.  “All Through the Night” is matched with a pencil drawing of a the massed headlights of a gridlocked freeway; another nighttime drawing features a police helicopter training a searchlight on the city, accompanying the tune “Where are You?”.  Perhaps a bit too cute, “You Smell So Good” accompanies an aerial photograph of a gigantic freeway interchange, while the photo next to “Make Love to Me” is centered on a highly phallic hotel tower (which echoes a shape on the music cover)  surrounded by flat warehouses and parking lots. 

Los Angeles doesn’t appear in every image; the song title “Snowfall” is matched with a drawing of a blank TV screen, suggesting the electronic snow of pre-digital television, and “Cocoanut [sic] Sweet” is set against a drawing of a disco ball, another centerpiece of electronic amusement.  To his credit, Macdonald keeps changing the deal; several of the images are suggested by the graphic design, rather than the title, of the sheet music.  The cover sheet for “Tenderly” features the open pages of sheet music adrift against a dark background with white musical notations, transformed by the artist in the accompanying drawing into a white-winged satellite floating in a starry sky, while “Time Will Tell” is set alongside a careful drawing of the background tile pattern, minus the text. 

Interestingly, some of the images forgo irony entirely, and substitute Macdonald’s own romantic imagery for that of the pop song, like the starry sky next to “Just For Now”.  What makes Macdonald’s work stand up over such a broad survey, besides his artistic good sense, is also a generous spirit, inquiring, inventive, and not totally devoid of a sense of wonder, a useful commodity for an artist of any stripe – modern, post-modern, conceptual… whatever.