A number of exhibitions at Canberra Contemporary Art Space stood out for me. Peter Maloney and Louise Paramor's Action Stations showcased in particular both artists' critiques of aspects of contemporary consumer society. The combination of the two provided immediate and subsequent visual impact. The exhibition layout allowed each to strongly exemplify his or her highly idiosyncratic and developed visual vocabularies while simultaneously activating internal dialogues among individual works. Each artist used colour to great effect aesthetically and thematically and the underlying ambiguity (a quality pointing to pictorial complexity) that quietly rampaged through the gallery space was clever and embracing. For me an extremely challenging (and satisfying) aesthetic and intellectual exercise.

Peter Vandermark's Modulations was exemplary of his continuing explorations into the built environment and our complex relationships with that environment. His work has always been characterised by an incisive intelligence and wit accompanied by a wide knowledge of the history of art and of modern art in particular. His is as much an art of comment as it is an art about plastic sculptural expression. In Modulations he used his understanding of the aesthetics of display (he has been for many years involved in exhibition installation at the NGA) to establish a finely tuned network of aesthetic and formal relationships that gave voice to individual works yet spoke of the unity of the whole. All art is concerned with interactions of various sorts and Vandermark's is no exception. His though demands active engagement and is a particularly telling exemplum of Duchamp's statement that it is the viewer who completes the work of art. Vandermark's telling and stylistically sophisticated interrogations offered opportunities for layered and varied responses, each as valid as the other.

Mariana del Castillo's Scars of a ritual past was a moving visual transposition of her experiences and memories of her past and present life. Accessing her rich cultural heritage, she capitalises on the enigmatic possibilities of quotidian objects, objects whose significance for the individual metamorphoses them into reliquaries holding intense and deep significance for the artist. This significance while intensely personal holds more universal relevance. It is del Castillo's consummate ability to transcend individual experience through her selection of objects and to imbue them with an almost mystical and ritualistic presence that marks her art as reality and fantasy combined into poetic journey. Her viewers are fortunate fellow-travellers. (Del Castillo's and I stopped at the Tuggeranong Art Centre (also in 2014) further exemplified the emotive and aesthetic power of her art)

At the ANCA Gallery, Tracey Sarsfield's Reflected was a quietly beautiful and, as the title infers, contemplative sculptural installation. This was a physically minimal exhibition consisting of three drawings and two sculptures. Minimalism was further exploited in the artist's limitation of her palette to the stark contrasts of black and white. The ANCA Gallery is a demanding space but Sarsfield was able to capitalise on its difficulties and used them beautifully as silent adjuncts to the pieces on display. Like much of the art in Canberra in 2014 her broad theme was the body. Sarsfield's body was body as landscape. Not a new way to look at the body (hello Brett Whiteley) but as expressed through her sculptural and graphic vocabularies a very personal view that opened immediate yet subtle dialogue with the viewer. As with the artists above I was taken by the aesthetic intelligence seen here.

My last favourite was seen early in the year at Beaver Galleries and although not a local artist, Lucienne Rickard's Some old waste of death was an extraordinary exhibition, and one I could not omit from my list. This was artist as maker par excellence. Her use of black was not only technically seductive but revelatory of an acute understanding of the expressive power of black and its concomitant ambiguities and possibilities. Drawing is both means and end and Rickard's skilful manipulations embraced the viewer and announced that for this artist the processes of art are as equally important as the finished object. In questioning the nature of practice Rickard raised complex and intriguing issues. In posing her questions in the way she did she presented exquisite and beautiful graphic treatises.

2014 will be a hard act to follow. I look forward to what the local scene offers. For me the best art of 2014 had as well as aesthetic and formal resolution, an intellectual edge that (quietly) interrogated viewers. Interrogation can be good and I trust the process will continue in 2015.