Three experiential exhibitions opening at The Sculpture Center on Saturday, June 20, feature new and site-responsive works by Noelle Choy, Jacklyn Brickman, and Malena Grigoli.

The separate exhibits, which run simultaneously in the Center, span sculpture, installation, video, and living material to investigate memory, place, and the invisible forces embedded in everyday life.

Noelle Choy's 'Switch.'

Running through Saturday, Aug. 22, the exhibits—Choy’s “Adventurers,” Brickman’s “ARRIS | a vestige,” and Grigoli’s “Genesis 1:29”—reflect The Sculpture Center's ongoing commitment to supporting artists at pivotal moments in their careers while encouraging experimentation in the field of contemporary sculpture, says Sculpture Center executive director Grace Chin.

“Choy, Brickman, and Grigoli each bring a deeply felt attention to threshold spaces—between memory and presence, the cultivated and the wild, the past and what lingers in the built environment,” explains Chin. “Together they offer three distinct yet profound approaches to what sculpture can hold and ask of us.”

The artists
The three artists each express their own unique, and sometimes personal, views through their works. Here’s a look at each of their exhibits.
Noelle Choy: Adventurers
In “Adventurers,” Choy presents new and ongoing works that explore biographical fiction through precarious materials and their ability to hold fragmented memories within physical space. The exhibition traces how people, conversations, and everyday objects leave emotional residue, shaping both personal and collective acts of remembrance.

By reexamining the preciousness of objecthood, the works retain the language of sculptural models, where ideas remain in motion and memories take material form.

An accompanying film, “Wonders of the World,” follows Choy, her brother, and her aunt as they retrace her mother's immigration from Taiwan to the United States. Moving through ordinary places—a bus stop, a restaurant, familiar streets—the film unfolds through a rhythmically candid and haunting narrative that becomes as much about her aunt, her mother, and their shared history.

Jacklyn Brickman collected plants relocated from East 123rd Street for her participatory sensory engagement exercise.Jacklyn Brickman: ARRIS | a vestige
In “ARRIS | a vestige,” Brickman explores care, memory, and the relationship between humans, plants, and place.

Inspired by the interstitial corridor between The Sculpture Center and Lake View Cemetery, the project brings weeds gathered from East 123rd Street into a constructed environment where sculpture, sound, and projected video respond to visitors’ touch in real time through a collaborative biofeedback system.

Referencing the architectural term “arris”—the edge where two surfaces meet—and “vestige,” a trace of what once remained, the installation centers plants often dismissed or removed, and questions how ideas of value, belonging, and care are shaped.

The work invites visitors into a contemplative, sensory environment that reflects on coexistence and the layered histories embedded within the landscape.

At the opening reception on June 20, at 6:45 p.m., Brickman will lead a participatory sensory engagement in which visitors are invited to touch plants relocated from East 123rd Street and experience real-time biofeedback soundscapes and video projections generated by their contact.

Malena Grigoli was inspired by 1970s vegetarian restaurant Genesis 1:29's fresh-baked bread found on its menuMalena Grigoli: Genesis 1:29
In “Genesis 1:29,” Grigoli animates material from the history of 12210 Euclid Ave—home of The Sculpture Center—specifically its 1970s occupant, a vegetarian restaurant that bore the exhibition’s titular name.

Inspired by the restaurant’s signature freshly baked bread, Grigoli cultivated yeast in the gallery, summoning the invisible ecology of ambient yeast that accumulates in any space devoted to the practice of fermentation.

Using a long-ago-salvaged door from the building’s basement as both a cast for the cultivated yeast and a portal into the past, the work brings together fragments from the building’s history to explore the labor of inhabiting a space—an intangible yet enduring presence within its walls. The embodied energy of a structure, Grigoli suggests, holds space open long after its original use has ended.

Thriving spirit
Taken together, the exhibitions present three distinct but deeply resonant investigations into memory, place, and the invisible histories embedded in everyday life.

"At The Sculpture Center, we believe sculpture can challenge what we think we know,” says Chin. “Each artist in the gallery embraces experimentation with conviction and curiosity. We're proud to be a space in Cleveland where that spirit can thrive."

Choy works through biography and material fragility to give form to fractured personal memory; Brickman engages in living systems and sensory experience to question how care and belonging are assigned within a landscape; and Grigoli excavates the layered past of a single building to ask how the labor of inhabitation outlasts the people who performed it.

Noelle Choy's 'Garden.'Across practices and media, all three artists share a commitment to making visible what is too often passed over; the remnants that quietly shape the world around us.
"What draws me to these exhibitions is the way each artist invites us to reconsider what we often take for granted,” says Chin. “Whether exploring how memory is constructed, how we assign value to living things, or how the stories of a place become embedded in its architecture, they encourage us to look more closely at the unseen forces that shape what we perceive as meaningful.”

The three exhibits run at The Sculpture Center from Saturday, June 20 through Saturday, Aug. 22, with an opening reception from 5:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. and Brickman’s Sensory Engagement session at 6:45 p.m.

The Sculpture Center is located at 12210 Euclid Ave, Cleveland, 44106; (216) 229-6527.