Saturated colors and boisterous prints flared across the 28 pieces on display at the Artspace Community Arts Center’s second annual community show’s opening reception.
During the opening reception on Jan. 9, artists, their teams of supporters and curious viewers filled the Greenfield exhibit space, chatting about pieces in the “Making Light” exhibit, a celebration of light after darkness with more than just a dash of whimsy.
Seeing Clearly by Isabelle Marantz at the Community Art Exhibition at Artspace in Greenfield. PAUL FRANZ / Staff Photo 
Community Art Exhibition at Artspace in Greenfield. PAUL FRANZ / Staff Photo 
Northfield Drive-In by Jesse Morgan IV at the Community Art Exhibition at Artspace in Greenfield. PAUL FRANZ / Staff Photo 
dark/light, a collage on x-ray by Ryn Hodes at the Community Art Exhibition at Artspace in Greenfield. PAUL FRANZ / Staff Photo
“We wanted it to feel like, how can we take in the light? How can we create our own light? How can we make light of a situation? How can we find the light? Really all interpretations,” said Chloe Torri, media and communications manager at the Artspace. With iridescent glasses and hair tipped with lilac highlights, she added, “We kept it simple, and a lot of folks ran with it in so many different ways which is so great.”
As viewers stepped into the exhibit, Shelburne Falls resident Johanna Weinstein’s piece, “Out of the Shadows” greeted them to their right with layers of a lithograph pattern of wild, thick black lines, streaks of watercolor and a white daisy.
While Weinstein said her past works typically stuck to one medium, she no longer limits herself to one creative tool.
“At this point in my life, being older, it doesn’t matter,” Weinstein said with a laugh. “It’s very liberating to me.”
The work took about 30 years to complete. After taking a graphic design class at Greenfield Community College in the last year, Weinstein decided to revisit a lithograph she stashed 30 years ago and add a little color, or light.
“I’m her biggest fan,” chimed in Weinstein’s husband, Josh Weinstein, eyeing the piece. “And I have very good taste.”
Further along the wall hung an acrylic painting titled, “Snowdrops.” Pink snowdrop flowers drooped their petals over a sea of blues in the background.
Artist Kay Pernice of Northfield said snowdrop flowers bloom as spring’s warm breeze blows in and winter relaxes.
“It was a piece to remind us that after winter, there’s a time to come alive again,” Pernice said. With a laugh, she added, “It is hard to remember in January, February.”
In the corner of the piece, a silver moon with yellow cheeks sleeps above the snowdrops, a signature of Pernice’s style. The artist typically adds faces inside moons or flowers to her work, a wink of whimsy, she said.
“I feel like I just live whimsy, my life is very whimsical. It’s playful and reminds me of my childhood of just indulging in play,” Pernice explained.
She said this whimsy captures the exhibit’s theme as a form of light.
“The theme ‘Making Light’ is about being playful and realizing that after dark, there’s always light,” she said. Looking around at the crowded room of chattering artists and visitors, she added, “It’s so cool to see everybody come together and really display what [the theme] means to them.”
On the next wall, a booklet as small as a passport holding spliced poems and words in the Irish language sits below another painting. The structure of her piece was inspired by her 7-month-old son’s Jacob’s Ladder toy.
Covers of stenciled gold birds enclose the poetry. Sophie Laurel, the Irish American artist, chose to stencil birds because the animal spoke to her as predictors of weather in Irish folklore, a sign of human beings listening to nature.
“It feels healing to see white people connecting to the land and really being part of it… It’s healing because it means we can do it, we can live with nature, we can do these things, we can live in harmony with the world around us, not merely destroy it,” Laurel explained.
Above Laurel’s piece hangs a landscape acrylic painting of the Northfield Drive-In “through my filter,” Greenfield artist Jesse Morgan said. Glossed with resin, the painting beams with the theater’s bright pink lights and a night sky that fades from turquoise to indigo, peppered in stars. Morgan reaches for saturated colors when painting “because it’s fun, it kind of lends to my use of space and light source and creates a whimsical vibe,” he said.
Below the theater screen, a zagging fence bends the piece into an effect similar to a fish-eye lens.
“It’s not one-point perspective, I want the viewer to escape into the piece,” Morgan explained.
Other works called out to viewers with loud colors, including a photograph of a model wearing beams of rainbow light; a mirror with glass shards titled, “Have I Always Been This Beautiful?” a still-life of books and objects nodding to the queer community; and a sprawling quilt stitched from reworked clothing with colors as bright as the inspiration behind the title, “Seven Eleven.”
“Channeling the goodness that we can right now and seeking it out and honing it is a really big effort that we can all make,” Torri said of the range of mediums, experience levels and approaches to the theme on display.
“Making Light” will be on display until Feb. 20. The gallery hours for Artspace Community Arts Center, located at 15 Mill St., are Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, 9 a.m.-1 p.m. and Fridays, 4 p.m.-8 p.m.