Jess Fijalkovich is a visual artist, curator, and archivist based in Cleveland, OH. They merge these practices through memory work, like detective work or archaeology, working backward, searching for clues, unraveling signs and traces, and piecing together reconstructions out of the fragments. Using sculpture, hand paper making, and photography, their work is an amalgamation of traditional techniques and modern aesthetics that blurs memory and history through abstraction. Fijalkovich’s recent work reimagines pajaki— ritual mobiles from Polish folk tradition— as contemporary sculptural forms that function as archives for the ephemeral. These suspended structures serve as vessels for grief, celebration, and ancestral memory. Their practice is guided by the belief that memory is a living, layered thing— something we tend to through repeated acts of attention, care, and making.
Fijalkovich has curated exhibitions at the Cleveland Print Room and Shaker Historical Society, and an art lending collection at the Akron Art Museum. They have also held positions at the Cleveland Museum of Art and FRONT International. Fijalkovich has been an artist in residence at the Sable Project (Stockbridge, VT) and the Winslow House Project (Vallejo, CA). Their work has been in exhibitions at Bass & Reiner (San Francisco, CA), the Carnegie Museum of Art for the inaugural Pittsburgh Art Book Fair (Pittsburgh, PA), Summit Artspace (Akron, OH), and Troppus Projects (Kent, OH). Fijalkovich is a 2023 Knight Art + Tech Expansion Fund grantee, with a focus on digitization and archiving. They are also a 2023 ArtsNow Creative Investment Program grantee.
