Driving away from the opening of the 'Currents in the Landscape' exhibition, I headed south along Stirling Highway. It was early evening and within a few minutes by some meteorological alchemy the sky had turned from pewter to silver and finally to a sharp 22 carat gold. Its intensity was amazing, throwing the car sale yards and furniture stores into strong cubist abstractions and making the distant hills of Cottesloe and Claremont seem to be positively mountainous. It was, yet again, a demonstration to me of the sheer wonder of looking at a landscape or a cityscape.

Reflecting on the exhibition I had just seen I found it sad that the representation of actual sites had faded from the contemporary art scene except perhaps in the work of photographers and film makers who are more obviously locked into opticality and ignoring the monstrous regiment of amateur artists.

That is not to say, however, that much contemporary art does not deal with the landscape, it does, but as shown by this well hung exhibition at the Cullity Gallery it is mainly about generalised attitudes to the landscape and to issues of contemporary art.

Each of the ten artists represented used the landscape reference but none of them deal with the look of particular places. However, Paul Moncrieff's piece is extremely site specific in that it is in effect made from elements of the landscape itself.

Having worked at Weowanie Rock Reserve near Southern Cross he has collected elements of the site and recycled them into simple dyes using organic materials found on the site. The value of the work then is vested as much in the process as in the resultant image. In this sense it is a thoroughly personal study and is as intimate as an early traveller's notebook.

Galliano Fardin is an interesting artist who also has worked in remote places but what he has brought back is an inventive use of energetic patterns of what looked like sine waves. These remind me of the structurist works of Vantongerloo, who when faced with the amazing experience of the aerial colour symphony of the northern hemisphere's aurora borealis said that the only response that an artist could make was to make a scientific model but not a painting.

Without the catalogue notes some of these works would not be immediately recognisable as landscape based art. There is however, in several of them, a sense of the sky or the ground and Jon Tarry has made a three dimensional structure which is very much about Perth's coastal strip and the Leighton Beach.

Paul Uhlmann has made a series of paintings moodily appropriate for dealing with issues of absence and presence. The indigo darkness of ink seeping into the texture rich paper is very much about the sheltering sky. His work at the Cullity Gallery was contextualised by a small exhibition at the Verge Gallery a week or so ago.

One of the few artists who has dealt with issues of the representation of implied distance in the landscape is Lorraine Biggs. Her works have a stronger image quality than any of the others and her pond paintings are most disturbing. Her perspectively awkward elipses hover above the ground rather than sink into it. No wonder the desert is a place where flying saucers are so frequently seen.

It seems that no exhibition such as this would be complete without examples of contemporary Aboriginal art and Mona Ramsay provides a fine example of the talented artists from Turkey Creek. We know that the desert in Western Australia is a place from which profits come but the Aboriginal artists have reminded us that prophets can also come from their land.

Although this show does not attempt to provide a full survey of the various types of response available to the contemporary artist faced with a remarkable and every changing landscape it does provide us with one curator's (Sandra Murray) selection of a group of interesting local artists for whom the landscape experience is most important.