Alison Jackson
Julie Saul Gallery, October 21–December 4
A graduate of London’s Royal College of Art and winner of an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, Jackson stages tabloid-friendly tableaux with convincing look-alikes of public figures. In her none-too-subtle series “Election Year 2004,” a Bush doppelgänger shares a shvitz with Tony Blair, caresses Condi’s leg, and—in one image reminiscent of the notorious My Pet Goat footage—turns away from an Abu Ghraib dog pile to play with his pooch.
Justine Kurland
Gorney Bravin + Lee, September 10–October 9
Kurland is renowned for her exquisitely composed shots of runaway teenage sprites and utopian commune dwellers. The photographer goes medieval in “Songs of Experience”—assembling a series of enchanted-forest landscapes peopled with knights and maidens. Her mystical scenarios also accompany fiction writer Jonathan Raymond’s forthcoming book Old Joy (Artspace Books; $20).
An-My Lê
Murray Guy, September 10–October 16
Lê’s black-and-white images of restaged Vietnam War battles, seen at P.S 1 in 2002, were studies of war reenactors in North Carolina; for the artist, a Vietnamese refugee, they’re personal as well as historical. For her first New York gallery solo show, “29 Palms,” Lê visited a desert-warfare training site in the California desert for soldiers facing combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Corinne May Botz
Bellwether, October 14–November 13
Emerging photographer Botz came across a set of eighteen crime-scene dioramas built in the forties by an elderly grandmother turned forensic scientist. In a series of close-ups called “The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death,” and a book of the same title (Monacelli Press; $35), the dollhouse-like interiors make for an irresistible whodunit.
Alessandra Sanguinetti
Yossi Milo Gallery, September 9–October 23
Sanguinetti began a collaboration with two young cousins, then ages 9 and 10, over a five-year period for a series called “The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams.” Shot in the Argentine countryside with a variety of props and costumes, the lush vignettes blend the dreamlike imagery of Magical Realism with the formality of Victorian children’s portraits.