Creative minds see potential everywhere, but in this economy, frugality is key. The Memorial Art Gallery's second edition of the "Extreme Materials" exhibit reminds me of the challenge issued once a month by the now-kaput DIY magazine, Ready Made: make something artful or useful from this junk. Many visitors to this show will geek out over the shocking use of unexpected art supplies. Others will philosophize about mass production and clever forms of recycling. From blood to bone, bullets to Band-Aids, and cereal to circuitry, this exhibit features work by artists who creatively re-envision the overlooked into new items and meanings.

Viewers get their first taste of the exhibit when they pass through the glass doors in the MAG atrium. The public was invited to watch the installation of "Ecosystem," a swirling pattern made from mass-produced plastic soup spoons, by Nick Kozak on October 13-15, generating excitement over the reprisal of the beloved "Extreme Materials" exhibition (the MAG presented the original in 2006). The swarm of familiar objects circle and sprout, seeming to nod to baroque plaster-relief sculptural design, and is an extreme version of a creative reuse of items we encounter daily but inevitably deep-six.

In the Grand Gallery space, viewers immediately encounter the garishly colored "Firework Drawing No. 9" by Rosemarie Fiore, which is a mammoth work made from lit firework residue on paper. The varying, shimmering gun-powder marks made by the pyrotechnics were trimmed and pieced together to create a work that is reminiscent of Jackson Pollock's kinetic style, if Jack The Dripper had worked in a more combustible medium.

Mark Wagner created one of the most interesting pieces in the show, "Fortune's Daughter," made of $1 bills cut and reassembled into a life-sized nude woman. The currency's filigree, foliage, and feathers are re-imagined and formed into a statue standing in an ornate reliquary. Wagner exercised a brilliant use of the single material, from slicing the dollars lengthwise to give them curves, to creating a realistically bushy bush, creating a Venus birthed not from the surf but from legal tender; an ornate portrait that plays on the old method of stowing money away in valuables, such as artwork.

Other portraits in the show were rendered in a variety of materials, including the Shroud of Turin-like rust-on-paper "Opal Brunner" by Esther Solonndz, the lit-from-behind packing-tape wonder "Lydmila" by Mark Khaisman, the screws, paint, and phone book pages in "An Artist's Winter" by Andrew Myers, and the masterfully painted (with the artist's own menstrual blood) "Corpus Regis" by Jess von der Ahe.

Other "shocking" body-related materials include a dress made of condoms and a wedding cake made of tampons, but those left me feeling underwhelmed. More interesting are two other potential gross-outs that were totally engrossing. "Negligee #2 (Serotonin)" by Laura Splan, which is a gossamer dress made of cosmetic facial peel, a gel that retains impressions of pores and hairs, and is embroidered with the molecular structure of serotonin, the neurotransmitter associated with feelings of well-being, sleep, and sex (hence the nightie). This delicate work had me wondering how many ripped samples the artist must have gone through before perfecting one garment. Jennifer Sirey's "Albino and Dream" is a thin, upright glass slab filled with water, vinegar, monofilaments, and populated by a slumbering, cloud-like skin of bacteria. The watery microcosm is pale and lovely, born of remnant wine and set to sleep in water: "the final piece is alive," says the artist, "but in a state of hibernation."

Emotionally stirring works include "The Wave" by Tom Deininger, which in its swirling mass of discarded items more than hints at the abundance of plastic waste in the oceans, and gives onlookers the feeling of being swallowed up. Mary Giehl's "Crystal Dress" and "Crystal Vest" face one another, garments based with plastic drawer liners, alum, and monofilaments, but ultimately covered in chunky pale crystals the artist coaxed to grow over her armatures. The statement reports that Giehl is "deeply affected by the victims of child abuse placed in her care" as a pediatric intensive-care nurse. Lit from within, the garments relay her hope that "purity of the mistreated has survived at the deepest level." I couldn't help but make a strange association from the concept to the artist's own act of manipulating something that was growing, unconscious of that manipulation.

Also moving is Suzanne Broughel's flesh-tone-mandala, "40 Acres of Bandaids (Every Shade of Bandaid for Sale Within 40 Acres of the African Burial Ground, NYC)." The adhesive bandages are arranged in a geometric pattern, moving in bands of color toward the dark center. "By using these to create a ‘black hole' at the center of her mosaic of skin colors," says the infocard, "she references not only the fate of those consigned to the unmarked graves in lower Manhattan, but also the ways in which African-American consumers have often been disregarded by the manufacturing industry." The other edge of the sword, of course, is caught up in the lack of genuine patches for our ailing race-relations history and present.

Jennifer Angus's "Creature Comforts" is possibly the star of the exhibition, and is a show unto itself. Angus's installation is not housed in the Grand Gallery, but given its own room in the smaller Lockhart Gallery, where viewers will find hundreds, perhaps thousands of colorful beetles and bugs, beeswax, and other media.

Angus nails it when she speaks of insect life as simultaneously attracting us with its beauty and diversity, and horrifying us because of how outnumbered we are by their legions and alien nature. In the provided statement, the artist says she hopes to call attention to the important role that insects play, which would seem ironic in that her art deals in their demise. But the statement also claims that Angus works with "reputable specimen dealers" and reuses the insects in many installations. The vibrant greens and blues of the bugs are set off glowingly, pinned to bright yellow and orange walls.

Beetles form the shapes of a sea monster and two skulls, from the mouths of the latter flow giant, beautiful flies. A low, narrow shelf holds beeswax shaped into skulls, flowers, coral, and various animals, in colors from black to pale yellow. Pinned below the shelves are large insects that could effectively disguise themselves as leaves, about 6" to 8" long, with leathery hides and spiny legs, as well as jewel-like, egg-shaped beetles. Dozens of circular cases, glass bubbles jutting out from the wall, hold what are surely artist-assembled hybrids: large beetles with butterfly wings; tiny beetles with heavy, elongated butterfly wings trailing behind them like peacock tails; and giant, legless grasshoppers that resemble fish.

In two display cases, wooden Victorian dollhouses are covered in beeswax, and populated by countless pinned-up beetles, tintypes of bugs (a nod to Rochester's photo history), and real bug heads and arms adhered to frilly wax dresses. Wax sheep form a wee flock in one section. Elsewhere a group of bugs circle a tiny funeral with a wax coffin.

Both times I viewed this work, I wondered whether this ongoing industry for collections and artwork would ever get the same sort of protests that the impending Otterness installation at the MAG is receiving. To avoid damage and retain maximum malleability, the brutal "killjar" method is employed to suffocate insects. Do these deaths have less of an impact on many of us because the insects are more alien, more pest-like, less amicable than a dog? This installation inevitably brings up questions about the hierarchy of animal importance, why the suffering of some disturbs us more than the suffering of others.

"Extreme Materials 2"

Through January 15

Memorial Art Gallery, 500 University Ave.

$5-$12 | 276-8900, mag.rochester.edu

Wed-Sun 11 a.m.-5 p.m., Thu 11 a.m.-9 p.m.