Investigations into the Metaphysical at MMPA brings together a group of photographers and image-makers who treat the medium less as a record of the visible than as a way of probing what lies beneath it. On view from August 7 to October 3, 2026, the exhibition gathers work by Andrew O’Brien, Gary Green, Marianne Bernstein, Keily Anderson Staley, Brendan Bullock, John Gintoff, Joyce Ellen Weinstein, Sarah Salomon, Brenton Hamilton, Fern Nesson, Peter Shellenberger, Elizabeth Opalenik, Luc Demers and Susan Murie.
The show moves through several distinct registers, but a shared concern links the work: how images can carry memory, symbolism, loss, myth and private belief without collapsing into illustration. Andrew O’Brien’s staged self-portrait collages sit between the bodily and the archetypal, using found imagery and digital drawing to ask where the self ends and the symbol begins. Marianne Bernstein turns to astronomical imagery, dream self-portraiture and medical scans, building a conversation between the inner body and the far side of the moon. Joyce Ellen Weinstein uses photo montage and sculptural objects inscribed with proverb-like phrases to fold spirituality, humor and cultural memory into compact, hand-built forms.
Other artists in the exhibition take similarly indirect routes. Fern Nesson’s night photographs treat light as a form of persistence after loss. Brenton Hamilton’s cyanotypes look upward toward shifting sky and transience. Sarah Salomon’s trees become charged sites where the human and natural worlds overlap, while Peter Shellenberger’s firefly images introduce a literal trace of living energy, part wonder and part experiment. Keily Anderson Staley’s layered archives, Elizabeth Opalenik’s mordançage prints and Erica-like mythic inversions from artists in the broader dialogue point to the same impulse: to remake the photograph as a vessel for unstable meaning.
What gives the exhibition its weight is its refusal to settle on one answer about the metaphysical. Instead, it lets the images hover between fact and speculation, body and spirit, history and invention. At MMPA, that uncertainty becomes the subject itself.
Image: Luc Demers + Peter Precourt, Totality to fragment ll, 1/10, 2026, Inkjet print, soot and fire residue drawing © Luc Demers
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