From the visceral and horrifying experience of riding along with someone plunging to his death to the meditative dreamtime-inspired patterns of outback aboriginal peoples, two Downtown exhibitions open a window onto art rarely seen here.

A part of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust's Australia Festival, they are "Workin' Down Under," video and installation art, at Wood Street Galleries, and "New Works From Utopia: Paintings by Australian Aboriginal Artists" at SPACE.

Paintings by Australia's indigenous peoples gained a foothold in the art market a few decades ago and have been increasing steadily in desirability and value, witness the $12,000 tags on pieces in "New Works" by matriarchs Gloria Petyarre and by the late Minnie Pwerle. A painting titled "Earth's Creation" by another of the show's artists, the late Emily Kame Kngwarreye, broke auction records for indigenous art when it sold for $1,056,000 Australian in May, according to Robert Steele Gallery, New York.

Exhibited is a substantial range of expression by residents of Utopia, a 695-square-mile desert region located in the north central part of the continent that was named by early white settlers. The paintings were recently exhibited at the Australian Embassy in Washington, D.C., and were supplemented here by Wood Street curator Murray Horne.

The artists, often including several members of an extended family, are represented by the Dreaming Art Centre of Utopia, an aboriginal-owned and -operated gallery, and by Robert Steele.

Some of the approximately 50 paintings are in the traditional style, comprising complex geometric patterns and symbols composed of dots and lines.

Nora Nangala Watson's psychedelically colored "Water Dreaming," for example, a dominant central shape surrounded by a field of glowing dots, contains concentric circles that represent "water hole," snaky lines for "sand hill or creek," nested curves for "windbreak," and pairs of plump dashes for "clouds," according to notations on its back. Not all of the artists add legends.

Jesse Hunter's "Women's Ceremony" is a field of elliptical shapes that through time and cultures have represented female genitals, while Anna Petyarre sets out neat rows akin to a garden in "Yam Dreaming," about a "favorite bush tucker" (food) of aboriginal peoples.

Fewer men paint, but among their contributions is Lindsay Bird's "Men's Ceremony Tracks Dreaming," which in its terra-cotta, rose and gold geometry speaks of "The old men making shields and spears in the tradition of their forefathers. They talk of the great Dreamtime beings that walked through the area in the Dreamtime." William King's "Fire," made up of thousands of unbounded, layered dots in six colors, churns with internal heat.

Other artists vary substantially from tradition.

Kngwarreye's spaced, horizontal rows of irregular black bars on white would blend into any Abstract Expressionist show. Petyarre paints hundreds of plump, rich brushstrokes that appear to flow across the canvas in continual, self-absorbed motion, inviting contemplation.

"At some point there's been a transition," Horne says. "That's what interests me."

WORKIN' DOWN UNDER

Of even more interest to Horne is the new media that is his ongoing focus at Wood Street. Last year he reviewed artists who had in recent years received grants from the Australian Council for the Arts, then traveled to Australia to meet with select artists, curators and gallery owners.

Ultimately he picked work that he enjoys, he says, rather than trying to present a definitive show. Four of the five artists are based in Sydney, where there's a strong performance art community, and one, Christian Bumbarra Thompson, who at 29 is the youngest, lives in Melbourne.

Though not by conscious decision, a theme of identity characterizes the 35 works in the exhibition, Horne says. There is self-identity, he says, "who I am," and self-identification, "where I am, how do I identify with my environment?"

John Tonkin, an animator who develops his own software, offers the opportunity to construct identity in "Personal Eugenics" wherein the visitor may, with the help of a camera and computer, manipulate his or her facial features and print a new physical look. The artwork grows organically as visitors pin a copy of their creations to the gallery wall.

A composer and musician who is a seminal figure in Australian video art, John Gillies explores his country's history of colonization and relationship to the land in "Divide," about which he says, "The cultural layering and ambiguity in the work speaks of the foundations of Australia, its current fears and neuroses and the intruder as both destroyer and powerful witness."

Denis Beaubois, a member of the performance ensemble Gravity Feed, addresses the suppression of identity by such means as surveillance in public places. In "The Fall From Matavai (The Terminal Vision Project)" a video camera, the object scrutinized in his street performances, stands in for an actual person falling several stories, providing the visuals of a dying man. The viewer fills in the dialogue. That Matavai is a public housing tower and known as a site for suicides adds layers of social critique.

Two of the artists, Tracey Moffatt and Thompson, have built-in identity considerations, each being of mixed indigenous and European heritage (they are both included also in The Warhol exhibition).

Moffatt, nearly two decades older than Thompson, combines feminism and activism in "Under the Sign of Scorpio," a series of photographs in which the artist portrays historic and contemporary women against colorful backdrops that contextualize them within an emotional as well as geographical place.

Moffatt's pantheon includes Indira Gandhi, 2007 Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing, Georgia O'Keeffe, Bonnie Raitt and Grace Slick. Into this she mixes aboriginal women, most notably Oodgeroo Noonuccal, a poet and writer applauded as an early activist for aboriginal rights and cultural preservation. Appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 1970 for service to the community, she returned it in 1987 as the Australian bicentenary celebrations approached, to protest the government's inertia in restoring aboriginal rights.

Also, two videos by Moffatt that are montages of film clips, "Doomed" and "Love," will be shown.

Thompson embraces his identity as a "Bidjara man of the Kunja Nation from Central Western Queensland and also of German heritage," and his conceptual works reflect this.

In "The Sixth Mile," Thompson, his father and his brother brush and rub salve into the hair of two small, blonde white children, in the way indigenous people might strive to de-emphasize their own curls, to make a commentary on how whites have imposed standards of perfection upon indigenous populations. In "Desert Slippers (Father)," Thompson and his father give one another the traditional aboriginal greeting between father and son, which continues on an infinite loop in the gallery.

"Aboriginals have been in Australia for 40,000 years," Horne says. "By repeating the gesture, Christian is saying they'll be there another 40,000 years, and that the father and son will also continue together."

"Identity, identification, are universals that can apply to contemporary art and to art of the past."