"Mailman" by Joshua Parker 8,500 9-by-12-inch manila envelopes, 2007.

"Sculpture" is still a loaded term, redolent of antiquity and antique aspirations. Yet in recent decades it has taken on a far more fluid meaning, neither set in stone nor carved in oak. For example, in the annual exhibit of three-dimensional work from the Midwest currently on display at the Sculpture Center, called On A Pedestal and Off the Wall, one of the sculptures is a pencil, to which something odd has happened.

Bloomington, Indiana artist Matt Steele's "Manipulated #2 pencil on pedestal" stands straight up on its pink eraser, like a balancing trick. But that isn't the trick. Steele has somehow denuded the graphite core of its yellow wooden sheath, leaving not so much as a shaving behind. The object is what it is, yet, as in Marcel Duchamp's famous title/trope, this is a "bride stripped bare by her bachelors." The work of art is an object that is not what we thought it was, revealed as an inwardly alien artifact in a world that is suddenly no longer the same. At once familiar and strange, this pencil could serve as an emblem for the ambitions of virtually all contemporary art: A new history could be written with such a pencil, an account of cores and rods and the slim, erect, elusive blackness of all structure.

Eminent abstract painter Gregory Amenoff curated this year's show and the result is, at least part of the time, mind-boggling. There are very few familiar names: Amenoff left resumes and artist statements to one side as he eyeballed photos of over 100 submissions. Less than half made the final cut, selected on the basis of "imagination, resonance, ambiguity and sometimes wit," Amenoff says. There are even fewer familiar ideas. This is a wonderfully, deeply creative, oddball show, full of objects which, as Amenoff adds in his juror's statement, "shine."

It helps that there's adequate space in the Sculpture Center's two galleries for works to breathe, each spinning out its fabric of associations. Last year's show, curated by nationally known Ohio sculptor and painter Don Harvey, was a similarly remarkable display of groundbreaking, rule-bending objects, but lacked the advantage of the Sculpture Center's secondary gallery, located 100 yards away on Euclid Avenue. Every recent exhibit at the center has offered the two-gallery option to artists and curators, opening up dialectical potential within a given body of work. At this show, larger works and bold metaphors seem to have pride of place in the deep, narrow storefront gallery on Euclid. Near the front windows Leticia R. Bajuyo crams more than 150 circles of pink-painted PVC tubing between floorboards and pressed metal ceiling, stacked in an undulating column. Titled "forces of nature: tornados and hula hoops," the sculpture spins between an evocation of a raw, timeless phenomenon and the very thoroughly mediated, but also irresistible, hula-hoop craze. Constructed of hoops that vary slightly in size throughout and get considerably larger at the top, the piece conveys a sense of movement (it might be even cooler if it actually did move).

Another quasi-representational stacked object, also longing for life and movement, is the human-size "Mailman" by Talmadge, Ohio-based artist Joshua Parker, assembled from 8,500 9-by-12-inch manila envelopes. The figure confronts the viewer, standing with accordion-like knees slightly bent, arms extended forward in a wide gesture, ready to defend its emptiness against all comers. The Michelin Man would be no match for the resolute squareness of this paper monster. The fact that no one (except a not-for-profit gallery) uses the post office as relentlessly and desperately as aspiring artists is perhaps the bottom line of this golem-like, cubicle-era parable. Michigan-based sculptor Matthew Boonstra's "Untitled (umbrella)" lies on the floor midway between the threat of the pink plastic tornado and the belligerent vulnerability of the paper man. Too heavy to lift, Boonstra's umbrella is made of carefully crafted, welded and well-buffed steel and is curiously equipped with a section of pipe pierced with multiple holes, like the barrel of a flak gun or the exhaust pipe of a motorcycle. Only acid rain could pierce this armor, on the defensive against any environmental pressures.

Back in the far corner of the larger, more white-box-like gallery adjacent to the Sculpture Center's office, the largest, most eye-catching work is a mobile made of the pages of a book. Dipped in reddish-brown wax and hooked together from a gently swaying, tree-like system of wires, "The Wax Book" by Julie Schenkelberg is at once peaceable, elegiac and somewhat ominous, at least for those of us who remember Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. The pages themselves are from a Croatian translation of the poems of Elizabeth Browning, and were chosen by the Cleveland Heights artist because they encode a beauty she knows in a language she cannot understand - like the movement of spirit through the opaque text of the material world. In a statement, Schenkelberg explains that her art is concerned with the personal, sensual nature of memory, and is part of a process of grieving for her father who died recently.

Whether or not Amenoff intends to reference the classic Stephen King book and Stanley Kubrick film The Shining when he uses the word to apply to art, it seems apropos. In the movie the character played by Scatman Crothers remarks, "Some places are like people: Some shine and some don't." He's talking about the numinous quality of psychic phenomena, which stand out from the background noise of life, calling as if from another world, soaked in significance and dangled like fishing lures into the circle of our dim perception. Certainly this is the condition to which art objects aspire: useless things that suggest some astonishing utility, in a world of reverie where usefulness has no meaning at all. Much of the best and most widely appreciated art of our time has a tendency to wear its associative powers like a coat of Velcro, sticking to perception with a burr-like determination, hitching a ride via flank or cuff to new places in the deeper mind. At a minimum, many of Amenoff's selections here at least take a ride home.

On A Pedestal and Off the Wall: Through July 26 at The Sculpture Center, 1934 E. 123rd St., 216.229.6527.