Cool off with Ice in August at the Jasper Rand Art Gallery in the Westfield Athenaeum. Artist John Briggs exhibits 50 of his prints and describes them as: “2016 was a winter of many temperature changes and little snow. As the ice around my house in the Granville woods formed and melted and formed again, I found myself spending hours with my cameras foraging for the spirits, creatures and secret beings who took shape in the ice around the edges and surface of my small backyard pond, in the potholes and drainage ditches of the road I run on at the Cobble Mountain Reservoir, and in the creeks of the Granville Forest. Native Americans know that the natural world is alive with spirits who are also the people and their ancestors. Some days I imagined my camera view frame as a window in which I saw—via various angles of reflected light—the Ur structures of reality: fleeting fluid and skeletal forms that lie beneath the skin of our familiar world where such items as ice seem merely commonplace. These curious “ice spirits,” as I call them, taught me many things. They communicated incisively, though exactly what they conveyed remains far more nuanced than any words. Perhaps viewers can grasp something of what they’re saying from the pictures they let me make of them on those winter days.” The Gallery is open all Library hours Monday-Thursday 8:30-8:00 and Friday 8:30-5:00. www.westath.org or 413-568-7833.