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COURTESY OF JANE LUND

This self portrait by artist Jane Lund is among the works included in “Exquisite Corpse,” a group exhibit on view in Deerfield.

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COURTESY OF JANE LUND

Jane Lund’s “Memorial to Gregory,” on view as part of the “Exquisite Corpse exhibit in Deerfield, is a tribute to the late Valley magic realist painter Gregory Gillespie.

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COURTESY OF RACHEL FOLSOM

This painting, “Self Portrait in Gold Mirror” by Rachel Folsom that is part of the “Exquisite Corpse” exhibit in Deerfield, was purchased recently by the New Britain Museum of American Art.

Nearly 40 Massachusetts Lottery scratch tickets, in all their varieties and vivid colors, carefully arranged behind glass. An image of a white pumpkin with a raw-looking opening - a mouth with sharp teeth - like a scary jack-o'-lantern without eyes. A self-portrait, of sorts, the artist's face staring out from the body of the 1930s comic book icon, Little Lulu.

This iconoclastic collection of art that's full of off-beat humor and a sense of playfulness - something altogether appropriate given that the title of the exhibit is "Exquisite Corpse" - is on view at the Charles P. Russell Gallery at Deerfield Academy and features work by five artists: Sally Curcio, Rachel Folsom, Jane Lund, Betsy Stone and Ellen Wineberg, all from the Valley or with connections here. The exhibit ranges from minimalism to realism to conceptual art, featuring vivid use of color and a sense both of the absurd and the broad possibilities of art.

The show's enigmatic title refers to the name of a Parisian parlor game played by Surrealist painters and writers in the 1920s in which players produced a combined work of art, with each person in turn adding to the work without seeing what others had already contributed.

In the case of this exhibit, the artists met together frequently over the past year, often at monthly dinners, where they talked "about art obsessively," said Stone, in a recent phone interview. After brainstorming various plans for collaborative art projects, the group settled on this joint exhibition and came up with the "Exquisite Corpse" title to reflect their own varying styles.

Little Lulu

Jane Lund, of Ashfield, maybe the best known of the group, is a portrait and still-life artist who works in pastel and who has regularly exhibited in the Forum Gallery in New York City. Lund uses intense detail and rich colors, or in some cases almost a 3-D look, to convey a sense of light and immediacy, inviting a closer look at her subjects.

In this show, Lund has featured numerous smaller watercolors that she calls her "recreational paintings." Though a few offer variations on portraits and self-portraits - there's the one of her as Little Lulu, standing somewhat forlornly next to a fire hydrant on a comic-book city street - most of the other works swirl with strange but arresting images, set against plain, semi-rural backdrops: a monkey wearing sunglasses, a worm-like creature with a baby's head, a gigantic purple rabbit standing next to a bulky robot.

In "True Love," two naked, hairless female figures embrace a naked male figure with a horse's head, or rather the head you might see on a stuffed horse. Nearby stands the body of a small girl, wearing a bathing suit - only her head is more like a skull, with light radiating from the eye sockets.

Lund has included a tribute to the late Valley magic realist painter Gregory Gillespie with "Memorial to Gregory," including a playful portrait of the artist that joins his image with that of numerous other quirky figures on a 3-D tableau.

Rachel Folsom of Amherst offers a sharp contrast to Lund's work with her oil-based realist paintings, though they also sparkle with humor. There's "FBF," for instance, showing an elderly man, pictured from behind, standing in front of a huge wall of rock and fallen boulders; he's clearly stepped from a car to urinate during a trip somewhere, likely the American West. Folsom also uses a variety of oddly-shaped panels to add more flavor to her work, like a painting of a worn cutting board, with two walnuts on its corner, that's shaped just like the real thing.

Her two self-portraits share the same sense of humor. In one, on an oval panel that she's painted to look like an old, cracked mirror frame, just her eyes and nose and top of her head are visible, peeking out from the bottom part of the "mirror."

The gallery wall directly across from Folsom's work offers yet another contrast: the abstract oil paintings of Ellen Weinberg. The Adams native who now lives in Watertown has exhibited her work in this area a number of times. Weinberg works with big canvases that mix dark, thick backdrops with swirling colors. The textured paint is often enhanced with a wide variety of mixed-media materials: tree branches, thin sheets of tin and metal, wooden blocks, old dishrags.

More distinct shapes and figures can be seen amidst the splash of colors. In "An Innocent Angler," a girl-like figure is centered amid the abstract background, and a variety of real fishing lures jut out of the canvas to serve as her hands. Several paintings offer humorous images of dogs, cats and teddy bears. "Synthesia" poses three dogs and a cat, as if in a family portrait, on chairs, all facing forward, the dogs with goofy ears, triangular noses and missing mouths.

Shadow and light

Two Florence artists, Stone and Curcio, round out the exhibit, both with dramatically different styles. Stone specializes in still lifes and portraits, with the realism of Rachel Folsom's work; but Stone uses pastels instead of oils, and she paints in darker hues. Her works are close observations of shadow and light, focusing on ordinary household objects. Her "Exquisite Corpse" paintings are all of gourds, but these aren't quite your standard gourds - they've taken on a life of their own.

Consider "Family Portrait," which shows seven gourds of different sizes in a pose that might make one think of the book "Make Way for Ducklings." Two taller gourds with long necks - "mom" and "dad" - sit behind five smaller ones, and "mom" is leaning menacingly over one of the smaller ones, as if admonishing "her" to stop clowning and sit still for the picture. It's a laugh-out-loud image that provides a new twist on the idea of anthropomorphism.

Sally Curcio's work offers yet another twist. Curcio fashions unusual collections from a wide array of everyday objects - plastic milk bottle caps, swizzle sticks, false eyelashes, plastic dolls' arms - to prompt viewers to reconsider what those objects represent.

Take her collection of colorful Lottery tickets, "You Could Already Be a Winner!" which is arranged neatly on a green felt background. The variety of styles and colors of the tickets catches your eye - these are all unscratched tickets - and the arrangement is somehow pleasing, even as you realize they also represent the millions of dollars that people spendon gambling.

Less pleasing and somehow a little disturbing is a collection of some 40 arms taken from a variety of plastic dolls. They come in white, black and brown, and in a range of lengths and widths, from porcelain-white and thin - think Barbie dolls - to obscenely muscled, presumably from the newer generation of steroid-inflected G.I. Joes.

For an exhibit titled "Exquisite Corpse," it seems a fitting display.

Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.

"Exquisite Corpse" is on view at the Russell Gallery, in the Memorial Building at Deerfield Academy, through Nov. 17. Regular gallery hours are Mondays through Fridays from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. The gallery will be also open Oct. 22-23 from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Admission is free.