Streetwise: Contemporary Print Culture at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Printmaking is an art form which goes through waves of popularity in Australia.

It has had several "golden ages" with an etchings revival about a century ago, then the flourish of brightly coloured, largely frivolous relief prints by an almost exclusively all-women cast during the years of the Great Depression, followed by a glorious flowering of bold beautiful prints in many different mediums in the 1960s and 1970s.

Peoples' mass movements in the 1970s and 1980s found reflection in poster collectives, at the same time as mainstream printmaking within its institutional havens entered into a quiet period, frequently losing itself within a labyrinth of technical complexity. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander printmakers arrived on the scene as a breath of fresh air, although mainstream printmaking often continued to fail to attract the most interesting and adventurous emerging artists as it did a generation or two earlier.

Under the banner of "Australia's coolest printmakers", the National Gallery, in its Contemporary annex down by the lake, presents a cross-section of some aspects of Australian printmaking over the past 15 years by about 40 practitioners. The chronology is not as neat as the title would suggest. The frequently exhibited prints by David McDiarmid, relating to the gay male identity and HIV/AIDS, are more than 20 years old, as are a number of other works in the show. Nor is the work all particularly "streetwise" with some of the finest pieces by Brent Harris from 1999 and Paul Uhlmann from 1987 having little reference to street culture. Nor would one normally associate the work of Petr Herel with any aspect of social activism.

Nevertheless, the main orientation of the works on show deals with art which engages with society and which frequently adopts a strident political stance. The striking screenprint by Peter Drew, Stop the boats! To avoid Aboriginal genocide. Stop Great Britain's illegal immigration to Australia sums up much of the mood of the exhibition.

The exhibition also emphasises not only the changing technologies in contemporary Australian printmaking, with digital and video works included, but also highlights the changing mindset with some Australian artists employing aspects of print technologies combined with other mediums. Sarah Contos in her Rehearsals for a wakeful dreaming combines screenprinted fabric with collage and soft sculpture on a monumental scale to create an exotic/erotic installation. Perhaps not many would consider this a print, at least in the conventional sense as an artwork, usually on paper and employing a print technology. This idea of diversity and irreverence for tradition is highlighted in a sprawling 25 metre-long mural along the glass façade of the gallery by Heather Swann, who has recently relocated from Melbourne to Canberra. She is an artist who relishes in the idea of crossing borders and creating her own feminist surrealist bestiary in her art.

The world of the rebellious zines also intrudes in the gallery space adding a welcome note of subversive chaos. This exhibition is neither a survey, nor is it thematically bound, but it celebrates the idea of printmaking as a democratic multiple, an art form which remains a vital and relevant aspect of contemporary Australian art practice.