NEW YORK—Julie Blackmon’s photographic works are striking for their exquisite use of color, their spare compositions, and a hard-to-pin-down artificiality that elevates them from run-of-the-mill family documentary to something eerier and more poignant. Look closely, and the works quiver with anxiety — about the tensions between appearance and reality, stability and danger, and the conflicting roles of wife, mother, and artist.

The trained painter’s inner struggle between the reckless, bohemian artist she might have been and the busy Midwestern mother she is comes to the fore in Blood (2008), says Claire Oliver, whose Chelsea gallery is showing the Missouri-based artist’s work through June 21 in an exhibition called "Domestic Vacations." The image depicts a child of about six or seven with spiky hair and a bloody nose, dressed only in camouflage pants, leaning against a wall in a rebellious pose that suggests Johnny Rotten or Sid Vicious. Blood is smeared on his bare chest and on the wall next to him, and on the right side of the frame a dining-room chair is draped with a crimson-stained white T-shirt. Behind it, a younger boy in a dark robe lies on the floor, the picture of affected ennui.

Relocate the kids and age them a decade or two, and the scene is straight out of CBGBs circa 1979, but as is, set against butter-yellow walls and bourgeois trappings like an oil painting and Oriental rug, the work evokes a sense of missed adventure and the restless imagination of a domesticated artist.

This is the hallmark of Blackmon’s images: the clever ways in which she works with what she’s got, spinning art out of the everyday. The eldest of nine children and a mother of three herself, she creates her tableaux — digitally doctored composites of mostly candid photographs whose effect hovers between still life and action shot — using only family members as subjects and her and her siblings’ homes as settings. While Blood has been manipulated for color and composition, the bloodied nose it captures is the real deal.

Here are Blackmon’s recommendations for shows to see in New York this weekend.

1. David Altmejd at Andrea Rosen Gallery, through June 14

“A fascinating fusion between geometrical architectural form and the figure.”

2. Olafur Eliasson at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, through June 30 

“Explores the hybrid space of landscape and culture.”

3. Mapplethorpe’s Polaroids at the Whitney Museum of American Art, through September 7 

“A fresh and never-before-seen glimpse into this artist’s most formative years.”

4. Rebecca Horn at Sean Kelly Gallery, through June 14

“A mythical and metaphorical look at the body.”

5. Jocelyn Shipley at Canada Gallery, through July 6 

“These fantastical and freaky sculptures pulse with life in all their captivating gore.”