The wacky 18th-century idea of an architectural folly gets a 21st-century face lift in Karlis Rekevics's "Veracity, Validity, Fabrication, Facts?" (2006), a work comprised of three large cast-plaster parts. Instead of crumbling Corinthian columns, Mr. Rekevics places around the sculpture court remnants of overlooked but ever-present industrial architectural elements - like the buttressing I-beams of a highway underpass. Bare lightbulbs attached like barnacles to the undersides of these structures add a skewed range of dirty off-whites to the color palatte. Mr. Rekevics's sculptural triptych almost reads like words fallen out of a sentence, and he seems to be taking a cue from Matthew Barney's myth-evoking petroleum installations.

The hot metaphor for curators and young artists is not, as it once was, the body or equality or race, but architecture. This past summer, the New Museum gave us a show in which artists used a variety of media to explore "Fictional Architectural Spaces," and the current drawing show at MOMA Queens devotes at least three sections to broadly architectural themes. "Building Structures," at P.S.1, completes the triangle with an exhibition of sculptures by artists "who re-stage the context and principles of architectural techniques."...

...The stacks and structures of dense, rough-hewn, white plaster in Karlis Rekevics' large untitled sculpture provide a counterweight to the ephemera of the Styrofoam artists. And Mr. Rekevics is one of the few artists included who actually redeploys architectural materials in a new context, in this case a sort of blasted building. Slabs of plaster accumulate beneath a structure of imposing plaster walls supported by wooden beams. Next to this structure, the artist has erected a tall, freestanding, triangular piece of plaster, a fragment of a ruin, perhaps, or a stand-in for public art; nearby two fluorescent light tubes attached to wood beams form a lonely street lamp.

...the brute presence of the work and pleasure Mr. Rekevics takes in raw industrial materials invite comparison with Richard Serra's enormously influential sculptures...