Both literally and figuratively, it feels as if Photography Beyond the Surface serves as a portal to a new dimension in photographic art. The group show includes innovative, exciting work by eight photographers, including a survey of Melanie Pullen’s work, Joni Sternbach’s Surfland series, This Too Shall Pass by Matthew Finley, Rob Grad’s Finding Foreverland series, and works from Christopher Russell, Rodrigo Valenzuela, John Peralta, and Kira Vollman who has created a site-specific installation, 16mm.

Beautifully curated, the exhibition examines the intricate connections between reality and virtual reality, the augmented and the documentary. The images, each vital and unique in their own way, are intensely personal visions; viewing them marks an entrance to an intimate and often challenging exploration.

Melanie Pullen, Dorothy (Barrel Series), courtesy MOAH Lancaster.

Grad’s sculptural wall installations use natural settings cropped into hand-painted shapes. Created with a wildly vivid palette, the series appears to blossom on the gallery walls; it includes a 25-foot by 25-foot wall installation that vibrates with color and fecund life from the moment the viewer enters the museum. Works such as “Is This It” shape a free-floating floral fantasy, lush and exciting, evoking wonder.

The long, linear 16mm from Vollman stands in contrast to Grad’s work, though it is also highly dimensional and textural. The rectangular piece features brown, grey, and rust-colored sections in a collage-like approach. The viewer can imagine walls, doors, stairs, fibers; to study the work is like being lost in a rather magnificent but dark warehouse of the mind. Each section of the piece is bisected by a black frame as if we were viewing actual film unfurled.

Sternbach gives us images born of the sea that are haunting and dream-like. A costumed merman and mermaid loll on wet, reflective sand in “Social Sharing;” surfers stride across the beach or pose by their longboards captured in warm sepia tones. Several shining boards, wedged in a small heap of sand bisect the exhibition. Working in large format film and using early photographic-era processes, Sternbach creates perfect images that have a pearl-like, antique glow.

Valenzuela’s offers a visceral contrast: black and white abstract work, lustrous and disorienting; in “Goal Keeper #2,” we see broken images of a desert landscape amid dimensional industrial detritus. Russell creates evocative patterns in his almost ethereal abstract works and merges unusual colors, such as the rich aqua and deep orange in “Willamette Falls #1.” Each work features images of historical plants and flower patterns that reshape dreamy, reimagined fragmentary landscapes.

Peralta’s sculptural work is a different kind of dream: witty and riveting. The artist blends reinvented, recognizable mechanical objects with the high tech, as in

“Hello,” created from a first edition Apple Macintosh computer Model M001 and aluminum, acrylic, steel, and fluorocarbon mono-filament; it includes tiny dimensional figures traversing a rainbow-colored floor.

The many worlds viewers enter in this exhibition may be beautiful, discomforting, elegiac, or intensely challenging; the constant is an experience that immerses the viewer in an entirely new perspective on reality.