Oops, I blogged.

Double extra cheese.

_{Tits & Guns by flood. Image courtesy of Jeremy Prondoso.}

IS IT PORN, or is it art? The age-old question is one that you should be afraid to bring up around feminists and/or skeevy old dudes, but I’ve always thought it was simple: it’s just porn. But flood’s installation at the second stage launch of Extra Cheeese showed that even gross old porn can be part of art, too.

You might remember me blogging about it when it was in the planning stages, and now the Extra Cheeese collective’s second foray into the world of recycling rubbish into art has been and gone. It showcased some of Australia’s most exciting artists, and with contributions from Eamo, Minigraff, Apeseven, Beastman and Kareena Zerefos, flood’s artfully arranged stack of old lady porn magazines wasn’t the only thing getting punters at Redfern’s Medium Rare Gallery a little hot under the collar.

And as the some 400-strong crowd at the exhibition’s opening night will tell you, cornering artists and designers with such a challenging limit to their creativity creates some interesting results. Katherine White’s clever reuse of spent Polaroid film cartridges in her monochromatic installation Expired created a ghostly, ethereal piece which jolted the viewer into an immediate sense of nostalgia. On the other side of the spectrum (and indeed, the other side of the room), James Jirat Patradoon’s piece Untitled suspended in midair a child’s gridiron helmet in a frenzy of surreal, hypercoloured comic book-style fantasy. Meanwhile, Daryl Prondoso and Nic Warnock’s mixed media collaborative effort FOAD brought misappropriated (and inappropriate) cross-stitch to the table: what would your granny think if you embroidered ‘Fuck off and die’ over her favourite cross-stitch panel?

And it’s exactly this kind of culture clash that makes Extra Cheeese such an interesting artistic exercise. It blends the old with the new, the high with the low, and harnesses creative ability into thinking outside the box. Even if the box in question is just full of old porn magazines.

You can see more images from the night in this gallery by Nathalie Sun.