In a superheated art market, as we’ve had for the last five years, painting – inexpensively made, easily portable, and thus easily transferred or sold – tends to dominate the field of vision. Sculpture, in these circumstances, often recedes into the background, but this in no way suggests that it’s not thriving. It is, but don’t take my word for it. The best way to assess the burgeoning flora of contemporary sculpture in New York is to hightail it over to “Make It Now: New Sculpture in New York” at the SculptureCenter in Queens before this excellent survey closes on Sunday.

A parti-colored bouquet of work by 28 artists culled from more than 200 studio visits, the show aims to identify the range of styles and modes that characterize the practice of sculpture today. In his helpful catalog essay, curator Anthony Huberman notes that “Ezra Pound’s famous modernist battle cry, ‘Make it new!’ is only partly present” in this selection, as it is only partly present in the show’s title. “These artists,” he continues, “are not ignoring the history of art, nor are they rebelling against it in a bout of modernist zeal.”

True enough. But the artists included here do, by and large, stand apart from the historical tradition of sculpture in one respect: They put a premium on lightness and transience. The heavy, time-withstanding materials of the past – like granite, marble, or bronze – are generally avoided in favor of the ephemeral, the found, and the fleeting. In this regard, one might usefully emend the title to “Make It for Now.”

Take, for instance, Jessica Jackson Hutchins’s “Death Shroud for Us” (2005), a stiff, black, shroud-like form, nearly 8 feet tall, held up at an angle by a wooden pole. To a sculpture lover, the color of the form and the pole obviously refer back to Richard Serra’s great propped sculptures of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Mr. Serra, however, made his pieces from lead and steel; while it might look weighty, Ms. Hutchins’s shroud is made of papiermache. Similarly, Frank Benson’s “MDF (4 x 4)” (2002), a curving plane of wood set on the floor, looks much like one of Mr. Serra’s sheets of rolled steel. Although lighthearted, neither work bristles with the sort of ironic allusiveness so common in the postmodern 1990s.

Indeed, the use of humble materials is, one senses, partly economic – wood and papier-mache being much cheaper than more enduring materials. But there is something else in the cobbled-together feel of, say, Brian Savitz’s wild, cardboard-box confection “Submissive Compressions” (2005) or Guyton/Walker’s coconut lamps or Andrea Cohen’s jangling Styrofoam, wood, vinyl, Plexiglass, bubble wrap, paper, foil, and string structure “After Snow Landscape” (2005).

Virtually all the artists here look on the past not with irony per se, but with exuberance, an exuberance most often expressed as bricolage, using whatever is at hand. They’re not commenting on art history, except perhaps when they are accepting one influence over another, they’re mining it – and everything else around them – like waifs in a vast, vein-rich junkyard.

Understood broadly, bricolage encompasses just about anything found, from trash to photographs (Leslie Hewitt’s beguiling series is a long wooden frame set on the floor) to the architectural environment. In fact, architectural snippets are almost as common here as bric-a-brac, as Gedi Sibony seems to acknowledge with “Even Though Its Forms Are Constructed Completely of Things Taken From the World” (2005), which places cardboard and carpet on the floor in front of a ruin of leftover metal framing from a wall.

In “Grounded” (2004), a cast-iron railing that runs up three brick and concrete stairs leading nowhere in particular, Ms. Hewitt engages architecture with a sort of surreal illusionism, while Navin June Norling constructs a wall out of found windows on which graffiti-inspired images are painted. And why not extend the found-quality of graffiti to painting outright, as Seth Price does with “Still, Five Hooded Men With Seated Man” (2005), an ink drawing on furling and collapsing polyester film tacked high on a wall?

Others gather orts from under the table of popular culture. Luis Gispert reminds us that not all humble materials are inexpensive, contriving – in one of the more stunning contributions – a “bling” sculpture of intricately assembled wood decorated with gold and platinum hip-hop jewelry. Jean Shin builds pseudo-utopian, or constructivist, towers out of empty prescription bottles.

My favorite piece combines virtually all the elements I’ve discerned in the show – bricolage, art historical and cultural allusiveness, architectural elements, and found objects. By Gareth James, and featuring a title far too long to reproduce here, it consists of two DJ turntables rotating atop a pedestal, or platform, made of bubble wrap. On one turntable a little sculptural object sits inside a box constructed of two-way mirrors; on the other a mirrored box rotates in such a way that it never reflects the object in its twin – a shout-out, for the museum-minded, to Robert Smithson’s experiments with mirrored sculpture.

That many of these pieces are composed of ephemeral materials means it’s likely they won’t survive – in their current form – the ages, but it in no way means this work is of passing interest. To the contrary, this gathering indicates that sculpture has flourished in the background, beyond the hot lights of market frenzy.

Until July 31 (44-19 Purves Street, Long Island City, 718-361-1750).