While all artworks can be appreciated without complete understanding of their subjects, the Dreaming is so central to Aboriginal art that it almost requires knowing something about it. While not a direct translation of any Aboriginal word, Dreaming has been adopted by English speakers to identify a vital concept in no way related to the dramatic episodes that occur in the mind during sleep. It’s also one of those words, found in every language, that change meanings according to the speaker’s level of abstraction, so the particular meaning of any given use must be intuited by the listener. At one of its more fundamental levels, the Dreaming refers to the world its users perceive themselves actually inhabiting, as opposed to the visible world in which they appear to spend their days. On another level, it invokes the process whereby elements of that intangible realm cross the boundary into the physical world. The way two images can overlay a single painting reflects the way these two worlds coexist. The Dreaming is known through mythic stories that guide the living, and while, on yet another level, a Dreaming may be used to label an artistic theme or specific ornamental framework, naming it always implies reference to the importance of place.

After World War II, the Australian government had forcibly relocated the sparse Western Desert population into settlements, so the painters at Papunya belonged to at least five separate ethnic heritage and language groups. Painting together helped them resolve some of their differences, and combining their artistic resources may have precipitated the discovery that sympathetic layers of abstract imagery could be superimposed. This strategy not only camouflaged the more narrative ground image, but encouraged painting more freely when covering it. The elements chosen for use in the second layer, including patterns of dots or spots, with and without cloud-like backing colors, proved not only useful in obscuring the ground level beneath, but to be a rich ornamental language on their own. Over time, it became harder not only to discern the underlying image, but to tell if there even was one. The doubled markings, meanwhile, work something like the ”voices’’ deployed in musical counterpoint, where two seemingly independent tunes are joined into a third composition that the audience primarily hears. In the paintings, an initiated viewer can see the concealed painting, while a novice will enjoy remaining on the surface. And just like Giotto’s discovery of how to give the ethereal figures of Byzantine art mass and weight, which spread through Europe and launched the explosive growth of art during the Renaissance, this development in Aboriginal art spread quickly throughout the Western Desert and prompted those in other settlements to take up painting.

What followed was a period of even more inventive painting. As is almost always the case, the early works feature richly detailed content, as though popular stories had just been waiting for their chance to pour out of the artists’ fertile imaginations. Layering then brought a gradual transition, in which as more ornamental approaches caught on, works featuring multiple symbols began to give way to less story oriented, but no less elaborate visual displays. At the Harrison, George Tjangala’s very early, untitled panel of late 1971 can be compared with Ningura Napurrula’s also untitled canvas of 2006. While each contains numerous repetitive geometrical figures, it’s possible to see how the function of those forms in the earlier panel is symbolic, enabling the panel to relate a complicated narrative about people camped at various places along the way to ceremonial sites, accompanied by the provisions required for such a long journey. In the later canvas, similar forms appear more abstract, without specific referents, but forming a visually satisfactory decorative pattern that makes a universal aesthetic statement rather than telling a specific tale.

While ”Water Dreaming at Kalipinypa” is one of the most celebrated Western Desert artworks, there are dozens of paintings surrounding it in the Harrison Museum that tell equally elaborate, equally private stories. Anyone who hasn’t seen them, but has heard them described, might be forgiven for wondering what they might have to offer a casual viewer. A work of art full of secrets that it doesn’t intend to share, which would probably not make sense if it did, may sound too little or, depending on the individual taste, too much like what can be seen in art museums and galleries everywhere. Yet without regard to what may be known about it, “Water Dreaming at Kalipinypa” and many of the works that surround it, could hold their own among the catalog of world masterpieces for their maker’s superb control of painterly elements: composition, visual engagement, variety and variation of textures, and subtle use of color being among their virtues. The originality displayed by these 33 painters is astonishing, the cumulative impact of Abstraction and the Dreaming overpowering. By inventing and deploying patterns that feel entirely meaningful, if not verbally translatable, they make the case for abstraction being the fundamental language of art.

The final chapter of the story told by Abstraction and the Dreaming concerns the belated admittance of women into the ranks of Aboriginal painters—although no one paying attention to the behavior of women around the world will be surprised to learn that some women refused to wait and sought out unsanctioned opportunities to paint. Officially, though, women’s work presented the same challenge to secrecy and propriety that the men’s did, and they waited a decade until a second private space could be set aside for them. Fifteen years later, around 1995, the entire painting community moved to better facilities in another settlement, and women could fully take their place in Aboriginal art. Of course, they were already showing original work, suitable to their very different role in society, and their bold use of color and less symbolic, freer approach to landscape profoundly influenced the men who had inspired them. The last painting in Abstraction and the Dreaming, in the room set aside for the women’s work, sums up the show and, in a way, brings it back as closely as may be possible to the beginning. Anatjari Tjakamarra’s 1989 “Yarranyanga” depicts a place through which a legendary people called the Tingarri traveled. The artist’s choice to paint this particular Dreaming is tactically advantageous, because paintings concerned with the Tingarri usually contain few specific symbols beyond the places they visited and the tracks they left. Thus this painting evokes the early narrative paintings, yet belongs entirely to the moment of its making, when less risky subjects dominate and more accessible content allows bolder handling. Each painting is unique and requires its own contemplation to appreciate, but “Yarranyanga” represents them all as well as any can. Every part of its 24 target-like circles, the bands that connect them, and even the asymmetrical background, which is locally varied but also presents two dominant tones, is made entirely of tiny, painted dots. Features like the irregularity of background happen far too often to be an accident, but participate in both the localizing of the scene and the dynamics of the composition. Aside from the extensive, rhythmic variation in the circles and straight bands, set against the regular pattern that controls them, the rigidity of the overall scheme is broken by several major variations. While contemplating it, eye and mind are drawn into ceaseless motion over scintillating regions that refuse to be still or to repeat, but constantly redirect the viewer along new directions, much like the desert in which a few vital landmarks are surrounded by the infinite inventiveness of nature. If a symbolic reading is required, one is not hard to find in life and the labors it calls into being.

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A beguiling minimalist interpretation of a full moon hanging over a New Mexico mesa, kachina butterfly sculptures with a Henry Moore sensibility, edgy digital signage that says things along the lines of “His Breath Smelled Like Guacamole and Tequila” —how can you possibly miss this generational show of Hopi artists at Modern West Fine Art? It may be the best thing they’ve presented since John Vehar. Well, there was Jann Haworth . . . “best” is always such a relative term, isn’t it?

Still, this one is special.

Well-known contemporary sculptor Arlo Namingha, 42, a sixth-generation artist in a very talented family, gave a brief talk during a private opening about his work as well as that of his internationally renowned artist and sculptor father, Dan, and his brother Michael, who works in the medium of digital inkjet images printed on canvas and paper. Historically, the family has been primarily ceramists: renowned Tewa-Hopi potter Nampeyo (1860-1942) was Arlo’s great-great grandmother. Great-grandmother Rachel Namingha (1903-1985) was also a well-known potter. His grandmother, noted potter and artist Dextra Quotskuyva Nampeyo, is still working.

His grandmother’s influence is apparent. Arlo earlier asked Shalee Cooper, now MWFA gallery manager, if she wanted to see his smallest sculpture. “He took the wedding ring off his wife, Nicole’s, hand, and stood it up – he made it after one of his grandmother’s pottery designs. Incredible,” she recalls.

Niman Fine Art, the family gallery in Santa Fe, has been in business for 25 years, and Arlo ran it for 10, until Nicole came along and was willing to take over. “That enabled me to go into the studio and make a mess full time,” Arlo jokes. “Which I love.” His works are primarily three-dimensional: stone, wood and bronze. “I do both cast bronze – and then this one here is a fabricated piece where the bronze comes in sheets of metal.”

The “Butterfly” he’s pointing to involves positive and negative space: “these halves here are kachina faces,” he says. “A lot of my pieces are very contemporary but you will find elements of our culture.” Lately he has been working on interactive pieces: “Windows and Doorways #1” allows the viewer to be involved in the composition, in how its pieces are shaped or stacked. There are two of these at MWFA. The one in the window is titled “Four Directions,” but you are not encouraged to do any rearranging — insurance, and all that.

Arlo walks me through the show and describes a few works in more detail. For “Ancestral Images #3,” he explains, he had to crack apart the stone, then come in with chisels and create the imagery off the texture. One of the images is again the butterfly, a Hopi symbol of peace.

It’s an image his father, Dan Namingha, also uses in a painting called “Hopi Montage #28.” Spoiler Alert: (Because sometimes it’s better just to look patiently.) Hung above a depiction of the parrot kachina (which refers to the idea of migration), the dense painting features the butterfly maiden, who wears feathers referencing the four cardinal directions, as well as a number of circular motifs: one refers to the Earth, another is a Hopi emergent symbol, the circle of dots is the sun, the dark multi-dot circle refers to the planting of seeds. There are references to water, too, and the canvas is split into three sections for the physical world, the spiritual world and the intermediary. The four blocks of color refer to the four cardinal directions, the multi-color wheel refers to above and below, and the gray multi-dots refer to a planting formation (“My great-grandfather used to plant in that particular pattern,” says Arlo). The spirals refer to the winter and summer solstice and also to coming from one place and ending up in another — “but you’re still connected, so your future is your past and your past your future,” Arlo explains. (Hope I got all that, but it perhaps gives you some understanding of the painting, and of another culture, a notably peaceful one.)

Now 65, Dan has been a professional artist for over 40 years. He both paints and sculpts – his Corn Maiden bronze is very appealing, her hair in the Hopi style that signifies she is unwed and doesn’t have children. Giacometti comes to mind in the slender flow of this lovely piece.

With his “Summer Moon,” Dan knew he had something unique. He asked that it be used on all the publicity materials for the show. The desert is rendered in swaths of color—ochre, orange, red and pea green—separated by bands of black with the moon a perfect yellow globe rising up over a black mesa: minimalist and truly a stunner.

Arlo recalls that David Thor Jonsson, a musician from Iceland, once came to visit in Santa Fe and composed a piece of music overnight, which he was urged to perform. Dan was quite taken with it and asked the title – it was called “Twilight,” perhaps on the spur of the moment, and inspired Dan’s “Twilight” series. Two of the canvases can be seen in the Modern West show; centered between them is a captivating hard-edge work, “Filtered Sun,” perhaps caused by pollution, perhaps by a creeping eclipse?

Dan’s youngest son, Michael Namingha, 37, studied at Parsons School of Design in New York where he also worked on projects for Hermes of Paris and Richardson Sadeki architecture firm. He even got involved in fashion design, Arlo says, which is when he went home to Santa Fe and joined the family business. He observes contemporary society and creates commentary, through a mix of imagery and words, on relationships and current culture. “She Told Me She Could Feel My Aura,” is one example. These are his “Santa Fe cliché pieces,” Arlo says with a laugh. Others are simple (but exceedingly complex) designs in black and white of “Yes,” “No,” and “Fresh” that arose from a stay in New York City. “He likes to play with words,” his brother observes.

The artistic line of the Namingha family, on display at Modern West, looks both ahead and behind (or above and below, as the Hopi might have it). Their artistic traditions stretch back generations, but are also heavily influenced by modernist and contemporary tendencies.

Dan, Arlo and Michael Namingha, through Oct. 10 at Modern West Fine Art, 177 E. 200 South, Salt Lake City. Hours: Mon-Sat 11 a.m.-6 p.m. 801: 355-3383, modernwestfineart.com.