Canberra Museum and Gallery's (CMAG) main entrance faces Civic Square. Sitting directly on to the square is Gallery 4. This space is backed by a concrete wall and enclosed by three glass walls. It is perfect for installations and site-specific works and, for the past few years, CMAG has utilised the space for this, regularly calling for expressions of interest from Canberra's visual arts community. The result has been (for the most part) a series of exciting, intriguing and well-conceived artworks addressing the pluses and minuses of Gallery 4, CMAG's very public face.

Hamilton Darroch is showing three works – Suntrap (2014), Echo (2012–2014) and Mrs Carroll's Tent (2014). Rather than an installation, these constitute a mini-exhibition.

Suntrap is the eponymous centrepiece of the exhibition. The artist has arranged 40 rabbit traps against a circular base in a sunburst pattern, the whole dominating the dark back wall of the space. The 2.5-metre diameter base is white while the aged traps range through yellows, oranges and reds, the colours of sunsets and Australia's desert landscape. The rusted chains and other apparatus of each trap are extended out to the circumference of the circle, simultaneously evoking the rays of the sun and imparting possibilities of spinning movement to the whole. Kinetic possibilities are underscored by the lighting that makes the shadows of the various elements essential partners in the overall presentation. I am reminded of the chocolate wheels of the school and church fetes of my youth. As well as formal associations, the choice of the traps adds a further dimension, referencing as it does the more rural aspects of Canberra as the bush capital. This is a dynamic and multi-layered work – visually effective and thematically clever.

Darroch's art is characterised by his use of found objects, often familiar parts of our everyday lives. His transformations of these speak of his use of art historical precedents as part of his uniquely individual visual vocabulary. In Echo, a barely recognisable basketball backboard becomes a contemporary invocation of early 20^th-century Russian Constructivism. Composed of interspersed geometric forms and starkly spare contrasts in the palette, the artist makes the work a nod to his aesthetic past. The reference to a Constructivist ancestor is reinforced by the clear and purposeful visibility of the apparatus required to hold the work up.

Art historical reference is seen again in Mrs Carroll's Tent. Darroch's work is the result of a long-term interest in the work of Sidney Nolan. He is citing a work from the Nolan Foundation Collection – Woman and Tent (1946) – on display in Gallery 1 in CMAG. His paean to Nolan's work is reductionist, limited to canvas and leather straps (the tent) and a rectangular band of coloured patches echoing a band of brown (a blanket?) that sits on the tent in Nolan's painting. Nolan's quirky picture is sourced from a newspaper image and includes subtle references to Arthur Streeton's landscapes. Darroch unashamedly incorporates the name of the protagonist of Nolan's picture (something Nolan did not do) into his title. Not only does he make celebratory allusion to his august Australian predecessor but also includes wider art historical comment in his inclusion of the Mondrianesque band of colours.

The combination of the three works in Suntrap is visually dramatic. Each work is beautifully layered and aesthetically resolved. The three together give a particular charge to the space they inhabit and provide an especially powerful and tantalising showcase for the work of this intellectually challenging and visually exciting artist.