The Lower East Side has a reputation for being an incubator for risk-taking exhibitions. And last week's season-launching openings did not disappoint. With shows that explored the current economic situation, irreverent sex-heavy collage work, robots, and a gallery space filled with piles of rolled-up painted tape, bubble wrap, and walls papered with collected galleries press releases, the work felt considered, vibrant, and most definitely worth a trip.

New Atlantis at Eleven Rivington, through October 4

In his New York gallery debut "New Atlantis," Adam Shecter creates an asynchronous video installation with images related to memory and the myths of Atlantis and Orpheus. The installation comprises two components: a monochrome panoramic projection on the back gallery wall and a TV monitor sitting on the right-hand side of the gallery floor. Similar images appear on both, but in different orders, and, on the TV, in hyper-color. The animation shifts between simple line drawings and richer, cinematic environments.

Allusions to the Atlantis myth can be seen in an images that shows water slowly rising in a corridor lined with ornately sculpted foliage moldings and other references to classical architecture. New Atlantis also appears as the text of a flickering Vegas-inspired sign.

The soundtrack, composed by Shecter and Joe Winter, includes field recordings, manipulated and corrupted digital files, and hummed songs that when heard together create a sort of ambient noise. The sounds paired especially well with a darkly foreboding image of a river at night with brightly lit fireflies clustering above the water. Meanwhile, on the television, a waterfall of painted blue lines gave way to a hyper-saturated image of vibrantly green leaves.

The installation is a collection of contrasts — between day and night, representation and realism, in-focus and not — that somehow evoke the way memory works: in cycles, and inconsistently.

Metamorphosis at Thierry Goldberg Projects, through October 11

Recent Yale alum and 2008-09 artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Khalif Kelly makes his sophomore appearance at Thierry Goldberg Projects with “Metamorphosis,” a collection of brightly colored canvases that create a loose narrative surrounding Robot Piccaninny, a mechanized characterization of a derogatory label for African-American children. Kelly is known for engaging racial stereotypes, with a previous body of work featuring children at play rendered with exaggeratedly large round heads in an aesthetic influenced by George Pal's 1930's stop-motion animated Puppetoons films.

The front room of the gallery contains three large Robot Piccaninny paintings, each filling its respective wall. Ascent to the Big Top and Steppin' Out (both 2009) depict Kelly's robot character in a similar position — with one raised leg creating a 90-degree angle and exaggerating the robot's mechanical structure. The backgrounds of the paintings are filled with geometric sections of color which look like pixels and create a video-game-themed backdrop.

The third, and the largest painting in the exhibition, is Brother to Brother (2009), which pairs Robot Piccaninny with a Bre'r Rabbit character; the rabbit bowing forward and Piccaninny tying his shoe.

These newer works are in line with Kelly's previous work, but while before the artist concerned himself with depicting children — if cartoonishly — in realistic situations, he's now created characters that remove the issues that impact them from the real world to a digital one.

Michael Patterson-Carver at Small A Projects, through October 18

Portland artist Michael Patterson-Carver's poignant self-titled exhibition at Small A Projects offers up drawings addressing the current unemployment rate, health care, and other political hot buttons in his signature outsider-art style.

The works are hung in close groups that fill even the corners of the exhibition space and continue on to a short temporary wall whose metal stud backing can be seen from the street. Included are both colorful pencil-and-ink and black-and-white ink drawings that use simple techniques to get across the artist's political messages; many of his figures carry picket signs bearing slogans such as “We Need Work” and “We Need Health Care.”

Although he's still presented as an outsider artist, one has to wonder if Patterson-Carver's critical acclaim and a history of showing at major galleries and museums have lent him a self-awareness that conflicts with this categorization — is he really as earnest as he seems?

Assembly at Simon Preston Gallery, through November 1

“Assembly,” London-based artist Caragh Thuring's first solo exhibition in New York, addresses beauty, nature, art, and time in generously sized abstractions that take Titian's Pastoral Concert as a conceptual starting point.

The c. 1508 painting portrays two young men sitting facing each other in the countryside flanked by two of classicism's graces — a woman playing the flute and another at a basin about to pour from a pitcher of water — and is notable for how these four figures, from different eras, fail to engage one another. Thuring's paintings, straightforwardly titled 1, 2, 3a, 3b, and 4, each pull from a theme in Titian's work, including the passing of time, to create an exhibition that is both visually and conceptually coherent. Painting 1 (2009) shows a central reclining figure in a redjacket and hat similar to the position and clothing of one of the twomen in Titian's painting; behind him are swooping blue marksthat imply water in the distance. Several bunches of three-dimensionally rendered cherries add another layer of visual interestto the piece. The interaction of these seemingly unrelated elements recalls what's going on in Titian's work, and does so beautifully, but with a contemporary, rather than a renaissance, bent.

2008/2009 < 2009/2010at Sue Scott Gallery, through October 24

By the time you reach the top of the stairs leading to Frank Evans's 2008/2009 < 2009/2010” at Sue Scott gallery, covered, as they are, with rectangles of florescent tape and cardboard, it becomes evident that this is not going to be an exhibition that follows traditional conventions or does what is expected.

Evans spent the month of August installing the exhibition, which reads somewhere between a page torn out of an artist's notebook and a piece of Dadaist installation art. The wall leading into the gallery space is lined with press releases from last year's gallery season collected by the artist. There is a diagonal curtain of painted tape across the back of the main gallery space, and numerous circular constructions composed of tape, thread, watercolor paper, and rolled up balls of tape resting on a back window ledge. The artwork is successful both as an obsessive examination of the gallery space and as an aesthetic combination of nontraditional materials making up ornate, site-specific works.

One of the most intriguing pieces in the exhibition is turningtime (2009), a circle made of criss-crossing lines of silver tape and an outward halo of 4-by-5-inch watercolors of a lone tree in a pixelated landscape. Toward the left of the piece Evans has written notes containing possible titles for the exhibition and a cryptic clustering of dates possibly moving from the past toward the current year. Temporarythoughts (2009), just to its right, consists of a stack of books — including works about Robert Rauschenberg and Caspar David Friedrich and Yve-Alain Bois's Painting as Model propped up on a cylindrical shipping tube covered with vertical stripes of paint and tape. A strand of tape hanging from the left edge of the piece with a cutout flower attached to its end is a lighthearted and humorous finishing touch.

Evans's inclusion of press releases collected from other exhibitions and texts that interest him grounds the show in the New York market and the art world as a whole: It's a perfect choice for September, when many are looking to the openings as a barometer of the health of the market, hoping to see signs of an economic upturn.

Spaced Out / On Time at Canada, through October 11

For an exhibition with such a cryptic title and a press release that quotes singer Ashanti and rapper Ja Rule, Canada's “Spaced Out / On Time” is surprisingly cohesive, departing from the expected but staying grounded in well-crafted objects.

The exhibition focuses on mostly new works from Otis Houston Jr., Sadie Laska, Chris Martin, and Dona Nelson but is given just the right dose of historical perspective by paintings by Joan Brown from the early '70s. Houston explores pop cultural references with a work in which the character Hank from the television show King of the Hill rests against the wall, clutching a beer, with a furrowed brow and the phrase “I am Jobless” written across his white T-shirt. The work contains graffiti of a drawn-in cigarette, sideburns, Hitler-style mustache, and tattoo of a heart with an arrow and “ignorance” written in its center. Laska, Martin, and Nelson, meanwhile, contribute materially innovative abstract paintings. Chris Martin's Untitled (2007–09) contains plastic domes with collaged images of James Brown and an album cover also from the singer; Laska combines densely layered stripes of paint and glass beads on her canvasses. Brown's contribution, Woman Waiting in Theatre Lobby, (1975) shows an isolated womansitting on a stool staring at something unseen by the viewer off theleft-hand edge of the canvas on an intricately patterned carpet. 

The second gallery is more tightly hung, with additional pieces from five aforementioned artists as well as work from Katherine Bernhardt and Agathe Snow. Directly addressing the show's theme, Katherine Bernhardt's paintings of watches have a literal reference to time. Houston's sculpture Obama Book. Obama Cat (2009) consists of a giant stuffed Sylvester the Cat with a construction hat on, his head poking through a table; he's answering a red plastic phone and is flanked by a textbook called Creating America and a book called America Remember September 11, 2001 on the other.

If the curators' goal was to assemble a collection of objects that are as "spaced out" as possible — from one another, that is — but still hold together, they've succeeded.

30 Years of Cut Up at Invisible-Exports, through October 18

Over the desk all the way in the back of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge's exhibition “30 Years of Cut Up” at Invisible-Exports hangs Sunflowers (2002), a cluster of pictures of breakfast food and vaginas rising out of a tea cup with a pattern of the English flag as its backdrop. This piece encapsulates many of themes of the exhibition: genitalia, S&M, and the Queen.

In his highly anticipated solo show, British artist, musician, and performer P-Orridge puts forth a strong survey of artwork from the last 30 years of his career. In addition to references to his homeland, the exhibition of 80 collages, some on pages ripped straight out of a spiral notebook, contains images addressing transgenderism and hermaphroditism. These themes also play out in his best-known work of late: Some years ago, P-Orridge embarked with his late wife, best known as Lady Jaye, on a pursuit of pandrogyny, undergoing painful plastic surgery procedures in order to become lookalike gender-neutral human beings. For Valentine's Day in 2003 they gave each other same-sized breast implants. (Lady Jaye died of heart failure in 2007.)

P-Orridge's art contains very confrontational imagery, and your initial reaction is to turn away, but his works are so intricate, complex, and visually satisfying that it's hard not to turn back.