NEW YORK—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.”