Contemporary Visions of Aboriginal Art looks at paintings from Yuendumu and Lajamanu. The Other Side is an installation combining video, audio, textile and mixed media. The last, Alchemists' Paradise, is apparently about abstract painting.

The Indigenous exhibition is the largest – 59 paintings by more than 30 artists. It occupies the major gallery space and is an impressive and coherent display. A quibble: its title is misleading since the works only come from artists from the Warlu and Warnayaka Groups and in no way does the exhibition constitute what the very generalised title states. Title aside, the works represent the breadth and variety that characterises the art of the Warlpiri people.

Colour is flamboyant, vibrant, vivid and bold. This is an artist who gives exuberant visualisation to the Warlpiri "Dreaming" as each artist knows and experiences that especially particular indigenous way of viewing and understanding the world. It is an understanding that remains disclosed only to those who have been initiated into the adult responsibilities of caring for "country". As exemplified in the exhibition, richness and complexity encompass equally rich and complex undisclosed meanings and the tension between this and wholehearted aesthetic embrace is, I believe, one of the great attractions of contemporary indigenous art to non-Indigenous viewers.

Spontaneity and expressive exuberance abound and while ostensible abstractness offers no barriers to a Western aesthetic, it is its origins in the real world of Warlpiri "Dreaming" that impart mystery and force to the best of indigenous art. The preceding, I hope, alludes to possibilities for layered viewing of the works in this exhibition. Not all works succeed – surfaces can be sloppy, delineation not as refined as it might be, colour confrontations often jar. The best works, however, are exemplary visual adventures, transcending (ignoring?) cultural barriers yet, in quietly vehement tones, asserting the validity of all creative expression. This is a joyful and exhilarating exhibition and should not be missed.

The Other Side is an installation that sits at the back of the major gallery space, entered through black curtains, it offers a different mystery to those presented in Contemporary Visions. The formal contrasts between the two exhibitions are theatrically dramatic but there are nevertheless conceptual synergies that underscore the different aesthetics and their ultimate sources. The artist, Sarah McEwart, exhibiting as Her Riot, offers private, personal musings on "her" (read "every woman's") understanding of the (male) art historical depiction of woman in landscape and how women can reclaim a position that challenges that depiction. She chooses to articulate this through the language of various contemporary media, and in this choice of media reinforces and underscores her critique of the history of the representation of the female in Australian (art) history. The means of her critique reference quite specific areas of contemporary cultural production, some of which escaped this writer.

Despite some misgivings, her very personal musings make an effective aesthetic statement. The darkened space; the formal (yet domestic) seating arrangement; the screen hung low on the wall; the black and white filmic image; the insistent audio: each contribute to the overall ensemble ambience. Sitting in the space, embraced by the ambient atmosphere, the viewer/participant journeys with the protagonist in the (relatively) short video presentation accompanied by the audio. The latter emerges from one side of the space and interfered with rather than added to the video images to which it was speaking. The video has a vintage feel, 1960s TV made post-wherever we are now. Her Riot posits questions that demand viewer response. She isn't about answers but rather uses the interrogative space of the gallery as a forum for self-examination that extends to her viewers. Like the artists in Contemporary Visions, Her Riot expresses an intimate journey, a personal relationship with her subject.

Tommy Balogh's Alchemists' Paradise is prefaced by Bridge, a large work (150cm x 245cm) whose presence in the M16 foyer is visually commanding. Unfortunately for Balogh the remaining works displayed in the long corridor to the right of the foyer battle with the narrow space and do not present as a coherent whole. Individually, the works in the corridor lack underlying pictorial structure and form. The white grounds on which his amalgamations of colour sit are stark and spare, and rather than working with the former they offer uncomfortable pictorial proximities. The black ground of Bridge, however, provides a much more fertile field for suggestion and allusion, and operates very effectively with the explosive colours that sit atop it. The artist might consider further investigations with a black rather than white ground. Balogh intends his paintings to read as a "melding of art and science". That reading is difficult to find.