A World of Things and proximate at PhotoAccess Huw Davies Gallery Canberra

Wollongong-based artists Jo Law and Redmond Bridgeman's installation A World of Things takes the viewer on an historical, temporal, technological and phenomenological journey. It is concerned with the relationship between maker, making, object and viewer. It is clever in its premise and in the visual realisation of that premise. The installation is in two sections although each is in dialogue with the other and one must not necessarily regard them as separate. They are symbiotic and powerfully so. The 10 dioramas Some Useful Values (2015) are mostly (but not all) to do with the world of science. That said, they each, according to the detailed texts in the brochure accompanying the exhibition, "incorporate a set of values that denote a power of 10 using images of significance sourced from the public domain".

These images in the exquisitely presented boxes that hold them run through a gamut of significant events in the history of science including Newton's 1671 experiments into the colour spectrum; Thomas Edison's 1880 patent for the electric light; the first direct observation of the orbital structure of an excited hydrogen atom; an image of the moon's surface transmitted back to earth in 1968; and the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field. Other images include Walter Gropius and the Dessau Bauhaus; a reproduction of an 1817 painting of the Plaine de Plainpalais in Geneva with cricket players; and photographs of the two icebergs thought to be responsible for the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. A heterogeneous mixture but all underscored by the way space in real, historic and temporal manifestations affects humanity.

The dioramas also speak of the history of ways of seeing and in their small scale reference 18th- and 19th-century dioramas and perspective boxes as well as the stage and theatre models that predate the preceding. The dioramas are presented laterally on a long shelf. Each is small and to view the precisely detailed interiors one needs to approach it closely so as not to miss what is there. This coerced intimacy between object and viewer for me removes the innate portentousness of some of the subject-matter and creates a multi-layered dialogue that is simultaneously visually joyful, thematically informative and conceptually interrogative.

The 14 photographic prints include collodio-chloride printing-out, cyanotypes, and silver gelatin photographs. The images are of the natural world and of the world of science, and again question the way viewers see the (wider) world and relate to images of that world. More than one way of technically viewing some of the images is offered. The Hand Gestures (2014) for example, "can be changed into gifs using an app"; while the negative images of the sun require the use of an iPhone or iPad to viewed as positives.

The images themselves are interesting enough but in combination with the dioramas and in the larger dialogue that that combination posits, they are integral to the success of the overall installation. A World of Things is complex and works on a number of levels. It is demanding of viewers if they wish to go beyond the superficial attraction of the individual components and it is this that gives this work an intellectually stimulating edge. Go beyond what you see to get the most out of this exhibition.

Running concurrently with A World of Things is proximate. This exhibition has been curated by Sean Davey of The Photography Room, a group established in 2011 to represent photographers with "an innovative approach and strong personal dedication to photography". The three artists chosen – Robert Agostino, Thomas Boivin and Spiro Miralis – could be said to be characterised by the very personal vision each has espoused. In this exhibition it is the "theme" of the undisclosed narrative that unites them.

Agostino's Slander (2014-2015) comprises 50 chromogenic photographs each 15 x 10 centimetres. They are placed in an ostensibly random arrangement that is in fact carefully curated to present a discontinuous narrative that visualises the unstated personal dramas and episodic events that are part and parcel of interpersonal relationships. As well as the unnamed "dramatis personae", the mise-en-scene of these events is inserted into Agostino's (or the curator's?) very personal collage. The photographs are sometimes imperfect – stained, soiled, frayed, torn – a state that is a metaphor for the deteriorating relationships (partially) alluded to, but also to the fact that the object/image is not private but rather something that has passed through many hands. Object and image are one for Agostino. The haptic, the visual and the personal are seen as of equal importance in Agostino's inferred slander.

While it may appear cliched to approximate Boivin's Portrait d'une jeune femme (Portrait of a young woman) to film noir, cliches often hold degrees of truth. His internalised images of a young woman are contemplative meditations on human relationships. The role of the photographer (like that of the cinematic director) is to externalise the introspective, to move the meditation from the particular to the universal. The singularly visually embracing images of the woman in thoughtful repose bring out the non-seen but nevertheless clearly present persona of the photographer/director as integral to the once again inchoate realisation of the intensely personal.

Boivin's Marseille/mer (Marseille/sea) removes the actuality of human presence but in that choice in fact creates a space for human drama. In a sense the mise-en-scene of Agostino's frayed activities are given a stage in Boivin's beautifully constructed and emotionally charged images.

Miralis' four untitled images, each from the Underpass series, offer the captured moment, the bit after and the bit before, but like both Agostino and Boivin, they are (partially) about the photographer as author/auteur; as director and collaborator in unstated narratives, in the anonymity of objective (?) documentation that comes from the very subjective activity of choice of image. Miralis'photographs speak of the power of what is left unsaid.