Ian Kiaer at Tanya Bonakdar

What might Ian Kiaer mean with his abject evocations of utopian architecture? Often based on research into relatively obscure 20th-century visionary architects, Kiaer's works restate his predecessors' grand schemes on a tiny scale. Are these sculptural installations quirky homages, or do this London artist's soiled and discarded materials--a spotty mattress, stained canvases and various pieces of trash--signify failed modernist dreams?

His second outing at Bonakdar, "The Grey Cloth," was inspired by German architecture critic and writer Paul Scheerbart's novel The Grey Cloth and Ten Percent White: A Ladies Novel (1914). The futuristic tale features architect Edgar Krug, who travels the world in his airship, overseeing construction of his glass projects and drinking champagne with fabulously wealthy clients.

The show abounded with allusions to architecture and design: the sheet of clear plastic leaning against a wall and the antiquated overhead projector in Scheerbart/projector (all works 2005) refer to the translucency of Krug's creations. The bubbles in the packaging material in Scheerbart/bed echo the modular structure of the tiny architectural mockup Glashaus (which refers to the novel's opening scene); the color of its yellow panes is picked up, in turn, by the bloblike yellow shapes projected on the wall in Scheerbart/projector.

Kiaer's materials seem to answer the novel's opulence with poverty. Scheerbart/bed, for example, comprises discarded papers, a folded sheet of hospital-green plastic, a tiny plastic bag, a Styrofoam box, a few stained and nearly empty canvases that feature a lonely pair of disembodied yellow legs, and a "bed" consisting of foam, packaging material and a small pillow. All the components adhere to a narrow color range, largely of grays and yellows.

The gallery's press release revealed a theme that linked seemingly disparate elements of the show: Scheerbart suffered from an infection of the legs while he wrote The Grey Cloth and died within a year of its publication. Thus the legs Kiaer painted on the small found canvases, the sickly colors, and the beds in proximity to plans and drawings together poignantly evoke the working conditions of the writer in his final months.

The piece glasserne kette exemplifies Kiaer's evocative economy of means, as well as his delightful ambiguity. Two clear polyethylene bags lay, seemingly discarded, on the floor. They were actually propped up by nearly invisible acrylic rods; even closer observation revealed a handful of tiny octagonal flaps cut from the plastic and used to create little structures atop the bags. The work's title means "glass chain," the name of a group of architects associated with Bruno Taut and much influenced by Scheerbart. Their drawings from the early 1920s feature impossible crystalline architecture in alpine settings. Here, Kiaer seems to wink as he turns trash bags into mountains and fantastical buildings.

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