The Duxbury Art Association’s Winter Juried Show opened Feb. 5 at the Art Complex Museum on Alden Street, near the schools and Duxbury Free Library. You can’t miss it. It’s the only building in town shaped like ocean waves from an Asian print, the only one with a shark swimming through the trees.

Don’t be surprised if you are surprised.

Judged art shows add another group to the combined interaction, the judges that make it a “juried” show. In this case, a “five-judge panel of working artists and art educators reviews the entries and selects 100 pieces for exhibition” (from the DAA website). This interaction means that some of the works selected by the artists are ruled out, and that the ranking of the 100 remaining is partly a product of discourse between those “artists and art educators,” whose selection as judges is also a product of such deliberations and organizational culture over time.

The result of this complex process speaks for itself at the 39th Winter Juried Show, and speaks with mystery, clarity, error and accuracy. In the end, you decide what you love, what you hate, what filled you with fascination, and what left you strolling quickly to the next work on the wall.

Amy B. Moran’s watercolor, “Before the Storm,” struck me as the most powerful work in the place, but won nothing from the judges beyond inclusion in the show. Moran exaggerates the ominous foreboding of an approaching summer storm in a rural setting, a nearly surreal moment in time and space that seared itself into my memory, as if it had boiled out from my memory.

Another visitor, Edie Hollingsworth, found Glenn Pollock’s photograph, “Grieving,” to be the most intriguing. Pollock won First Place for the Photography category. Among the other visitors, each found his or her own favorite, and often argued in gentle rivalry for the fine points of the work that made it stand out. One loves the calm of one work, another praises the drama or skill of a different piece. Everyone present, I think, would agree with local artist and teacher Gayle Loik’s observation that the show is a marvelous and varied gathering of many very talented and diverse artists.

No one present when I was there could explain the judges’ choice of Patricia Berube’s monoprint, “Dress in 4 Cross Section” as the Best in Show. The work struck me as a pleasant and interesting pattern for kitchen curtains, overshadowed by a number of more powerful works in the show. I suspect that my status as a dilatant artiste has failed me, and betrays my lack of cutting-edge knowledge of the print maker’s craft, or the craft of judging art.

I am also increasingly disturbed by the number of paintings, charcoals, and other works that are obviously taken from photographs. Why not draw and paint from life, from memory, or from imagination? No time? The solution is to take more time, not take a photo to be painted later. Of course, my own favorite might be a painting from a photograph. I can be fooled.

See what you think. The Winter Juried Show runs through April. The Art Complex Museum is free and open each week, Wednesday through Sunday from 1 to 4 p.m. I know you’ll see art that you love, maybe art that you can’t stand, and a few that simply mystify. The mysteries may be the best of all.