Individual installations by nine international artists who probe "Inner and Outer Space" add up to one of the Mattress Factory's best exhibitions to date. The North Side venue is no stranger to artists who transgress routine expectations, aesthetic and metaphysical, to create encompassing experiences that position visitors to imagine the world anew.

For this show, says guest curator Dara Meyers-Kingsley, "the 'inner and outer space theme' -- the conceptual underpinning for the exhibition -- not only relates to the form and content of the work but also an approach to artistic practice." The works spill through floors, out windows, into the parking area, onto a Jumbotron and arrive via e-mail. One was completed with the help of local artisans.

Case in point is exhibiting artist David Ellis, who will give an Artist Talk at 7 tonight at the museum ($5, members free). His trademark "animated motion paintings" are captivating, both for their vibrant graphic imagery and their intriguing process.

To create "OKAY," included in the exhibition, he set up a Quonset-hut-like structure in the museum lobby within which he painted from morning until night during his 15-day residency. Ellis paints over previous works, layering imagery that is recorded every few seconds by a camera suspended overhead. He edits these digital images into mesmerizing projected works that change with flipbook speed.

His "FLY" is playing through month's end on the Jumbotron at CAPA, where the New York artist has been conducting workshops this week. In it he does a full-body glide across a floor, wet and illuminated with paint, looking somewhat like he's engulfed in flame.

Tweaking the experience of speed and motion also plays out in Italian native and New York resident Luca Buvoli's "Instant Before Incident (Marinetti's Drive 1908)," a reference to an accident Filippo Tommaso Marinetti experienced the year that he wrote "The Futurist Manifesto." An engaging short video, "Ave Machina: Instant Before Incident," expands upon the sculptural work through a combination of filmic devices and interviews.

Quiet lyricism prevails in Mark Garry's beautiful and calming "being here," a room of colored threads patiently strung through the gallery, before and beyond the windows' soft light. At various times of the day -- and season -- intense rainbow bands appear, travel and diminish, determined by the sun's angle, indeed by its very presence or lack thereof.

The Irish artist further connects the installation with the world outside through compositions for music boxes, derived from his drawing of the museum's surrounding neighborhood. Visitors may gently operate the boxes to experience Garry's auditory interpretation of what they may see through the gallery windows. Completing "being here" are representations of grasses found outside the museum that he finely carved of basswood, placed as though growing out of the vintage wooden floors.

Fantastical, too, are Daniel Canogar's "Midnight Plumbers," I and II, their denizens either floating in peaceful remove or netted and suspended, awaiting ... what? Regardless, the Spaniard's use of fiber optic cable is the most imaginative, and enthralling, I've seen.

Inviting movement into one's own "inner space" is Japanese Yumi Kori's darkened grotto, "kanata" in the museum cellar. Both haven and hazard, the visitor enters a landscape of remove that welcomes and threatens. Tenseness is fortified by sensed dampness rising from the velvety black that surrounds those who venture onto the platform of this dreamlike work that translates "far in the distance."

More viscerally fearful is American Sarah Oppenheimer's "610-3356," recalling, if vaguely, Gordon Matta-Clark, but having far more guttural impact. It's fourth-floor gallery is kept locked and it's well worth the trip back to the admissions desk to request access. DO secure any children before entering.

Mary Temple's Untitled presentation is, in a way, the most scary because it's drawn, literally, from news headlines, changed daily by the museum staff who substitute imagery and text that the New York artist e-mails and that, thanks to a special printer and paper, mimics original drawing quite well. Three months at a time are exhibited of this work, which began before exhibition opening day and will continue until its end.

If the politics are overt and the broader commentary nuanced in her Untitled work, Temple's elegant "Transparent Brick Wall for Kusama" (the title a reference to an installation by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama in Mattress' permanent collection) expands upon the role of suggestion and preconditioned expectation in coloring one's interior as well as world views.

Rounding out the exhibition are American Allison Smith's "Jugs, Pitchers, Bottles, and Crocks, Household Linens and Yardage in Stock," shelving filled with reproductions of early American household goods that have been politicized by substituting traditional makings (themselves sometimes commemorative and/or political) with reminders of current conflict and crisis. And Bahamian Tavares Strachan's "Where do we go from here (from The Orthostatic Tolerance)," part oversized natural history diorama inside the museum and part space-mission tracking station in the parking lot (for more, go to www.post-gazette.com and search Tavares Strachan).

Because of the experimental nature and evolving (often to the last minute) process of the art supported by the Mattress Factory, installations achieve various levels of success. Independent curator Meyers-Kingsley, who also teaches in the Fine Arts Department at Parsons School of Design, and the selected artists in this exhibition succeed on two levels -- with individual projects and as a themed whole.

"Inner" continues through Jan. 11 at 500 Sampsonia Way, North Side. Admission is $10, seniors $8, students $7, children under 6 and members free, Thursdays half-price. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays and 1 to 5 p.m. Sundays (closed Christmas and New Year's Day). For information, call 412-231-3169 or visit www.mattress.org