CHRISTOPH DRAEGER APPROPRIATES mass media images of disasters and prints them as puzzles. Among other catastrophes, the works in "New Landscapes" include pictures of the devastation left behind by the crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and the earthquakes that hit Taipei in 1999, Los Angeles in 1990, and San Francisco in 1906. The images are titillating. They incite voyeuristic fascination by provoking the viewer's fears and aggressions while allowing them to be enjoyed from an (apparently) safe distance. Presented as landscapes and printed on puzzles, Draeger's art speaks to the modern condition in which the world can no longer be imagined as a cohesive whole, but rather appears unstable, fragmented, and plagued by endless crises. Drawn from newspapers, TV, and the Internet, the works invite consideration of the role of mass media in shaping our experience of disasters. But it's hard to determine what defines Draeger's critical vantage on the media, or if he even has one. To the contrary, Draeger seems to share in the mass media's exploitative sensationalism and to extend it to the world of fine art. A striking aspect of the show is how attractive these pictures are, and how easy it is to imagine seeing them hanging in the living room of a middle-class home. Whether self-conscious or not, Draeger's work testifies not only to mass culture's dependence on the thrills of fear and violence but also to its normalization of them. The catastrophes pictured are carefully framed behind glass, and the puzzles are reassuringly complete. In this way, though Draeger focuses largely on natural disasters, his work also speaks to the current politics of terror. Rather than historical events, the crises of the modern world are primarily presented as objects of aesthetic fascination that the artist draws upon and, like the political leader, implicitly claims to master through his distance from them. The show includes Draeger's video installation, which overlaps Hitchcock's Psycho and its recent remake. And in the gallery's Project Room, Reuben Lorch-Miller has installed a neon sign that simply insists, "Forget it." Tues.-Fri., 10:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m.; Sat., 11 a.m.-5:30 p.m., 49 Geary, second floor, S.F. (415) 339-1439. (Clark Buckner)