THE Magazine - Los Angeles

The title of Chris Jahncke's show, Occupational Therapy, was eerily appropriate. The repetition of lines and subdued color in Jahncke's paintings are slowly paced, like studies for a larger whole, possibly an homage to the embedded power of the meteorite fragments that Jahncke uses literally as focal points secured in the center of certain works. Even in the cramped confines of the gallery space, the small works were endearing, suggesting a hybrid between Yoshimoto Nara and Mark Grotjahn, but achieving a childlike charm in the most symmetrical pieces.

Occupying a side room were the collaged paper landscapes of Lisi Raskin. The source images for these landscapes were taken from the Swedish Space Corporation Estrange Launch Site. The landscapes are engaging in their construction but oddly un-desolate in their ultimate appearance. The technology-referencing sources in each collage (a laboratory office, the exterior of a high security building with a snowy landscape) contrast curtly with Raskin's paper-scissors-and-glue approach.

In the back "garage", Julie Orser's 3-minute video Blood Work tropes and trips on that iconic element of horror movies, fake blood. It's splashed, sprayed, and poured into odd objects, including a white handbag, a teddy bear, and a cell phone. It's even sprayed on a screen projection of the movie Carrie. Orser's video doesn't quite demystify phony blood, but it does make a humorous point about the division between real horror and the façade or construction of the film genre.