Two interesting art projects made from the scavenged materials of sex crossed my path this week.

The San Francisco artist Troung Tran created 9,000 hand crafted butterflies from printed porn images and assembled them in a show of nine works at the Telegraph Hill Gallery. Aside from the metamorphosis from porn- fleshy and earthbound, to the ephemeral beauty of butterflies, the work is a pointed critique of Damien Hirst's work "In and Out of Love" in which he used 9,000 live insects.

In addition to questioning the morality of Hirst's piece (and in my mind any critique of Hirst is a critique of that crazy money part of the art world) Truong considers issues of sexual identity. Like other mostart art involving porn, Truong's work addresses issues of the gaze, and subject/object dynamics, but it has evolved from simple commentary on sexism and economic inequality. In fact Truong's piece includes only white male bodies- according to an interview he gave with The Bold Italic, he does not want to cut into images of people of color, as "our identities in this society are already fragmented."

The exhibition’s full title is Or I Know You Are But What Am I Or The Fleecing of Americana Or 9000 Butterflies For Damien Hirst Or I’d Rather Do This And Call It Art Or What You’ve Heard Is True Or And Away We Go Or The Miseducation Of Gnourt Nart Or It’s Complicated Or I Meant to Say Please Pass The Sugar.

The second artist, Jonathon Rosen, made a piece called "I Want to Be Uninhibited" out of deflated love dolls. Unlike Truong's work, there is no beauty here, just the deflated dolls and the sharp contrast they suggest between intimacy and sex. What is the meaning of being "uninhibited" with a doll? Is it the same as being uninhibited with any other sex toy?