For contemporary visual artists, the world of color is a fascinating and inexhaustible playground.

A choice of color can be specific or vague. It can connote ideas of race or ethnicity, history or philosophy, memory or emotion. It can mean nothing at all.

The impossibly wide realm of color serves as the broad organizing theme behind a show of work from five artists opening today at the Villa Maria College art gallery.

Simply titled “5,” the exhibition, curated by local artist and Villa Maria instructor Adam Weekley, showcases work from artists for whom color plays a central role.

Weekley encountered four of the artists during an artist-development program known as MARK, organized earlier this year by the New York Foundation for the Arts. With the exception of Buffalobased artist Ani Hoover, they hail from outside of Western New York.

The work in the show, which was designed to complement a color theory course Weekley teaches at the college, is largely abstract. It ranges from minimalist pieces designed to play games with the brain by Canton-based painter Kasarian Dane to the gestural drawings of Kathleen Thum, which reference the interconnectedness of human biology.

Weekley’s approach, he said, was to juxtapose work of a minimalist nature with more expressive or gestural pieces in order to achieve an overall sense of tension and balance among five wildly disparate variations on a theme.

Of Dane’s works, which have the look of television test patterns or flags painted onto aluminum sheets, Weekley said, “I like that kind of work, but I like to sort of see it next to something gestural. I really like art that has a bit of a sense of humor, so I wanted to make sure that was part of the show.”

A look at the artists:

Rebekah Champ, based in Minneapolis, creates soft sculptures as well as drawings installations that, as she writes in her artist statement, consider “how the body interacts with institutional architecture and decor.”

Kasarian Dane, an art instructor at St. Lawrence University, works out of a solid tradition of color-based abstraction. Western New Yorkers who stopped by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery’s 2007 exhibition of work from the collection of Giuseppe Panza di Biumo saw work similarly meant to exploit the brain’s reactions to unexpected juxtapositions of color.

Ani Hoover lives in Buffalo and is well known to local gallerygoers for one resurgent symbol: The dripping orb of paint. Hoover, perhaps Buffalo’s most visible artist in the last two years, works in bright and jarring colors, which can lend a candy-coated magnetism to her formally compelling work.

Kathleen Thum’s big, biomorphic wall drawings are described by the artist as “internal landscapes of our bodies.” “My hope,” she wrote, “is that the viewer will make an emotive, physical connection to the impermanent, ethereal nature of the pieces.”

Tricia Wright works in patterns and draws inspiration from wallpaper. Color, therefore, plays a big role in her work. Her pieces are bound up with personal history and, as art critic Dominique Nahas writes, offer “a mental doorway into the past and its contents.”

PREVIEW

WHAT: “5”

WHEN: Opening reception from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. today. Continues through Dec. 11.

WHERE: Villa Maria Paul William Beltz Family Art Gallery

INFO: 961-1833