Calling the new gallery exhibition Breaking News "ripped from the headlines" is an especially apt use of the otherwise tired phrase.

The exhibit, currently on display at Kensington's Little Berlin gallery, is something like the New York Times after it's run through a blender.

Using the mass media news cycle as their muse, artists Gabriel Boyce, of the Art Museum area, and Preston Link, of South Philly, have created an exhibit that uses humor, artistic expression and innovation to comment on current events.

The exhibit runs throughout October and features pieces specifically designed to directly reference national or global news items.

Upon entering into the gallery at 119 W. Montgomery Ave., visitors are immediately greeted with a familiar topic that has generated headlines throughout the world.

The subject of the piece - in which a pink, plastic pig is seen holding a thermometer in its mouth while seated beside a crumpled, aged stuffed pig - is easy to identify.

"Right here, that's swine flu," said South Philadelphia-based artist, Beth Heinly, as she offered a tour of the exhibit.

Presenting Breaking News in her first turn as gallery curator, Heinly said the two pigs - one a toy, the other an antique stuffed animal - are intend to show that the elderly and the young are the most susceptible to the disease.

Throughout the wide, open exhibition area at Little Berlin pieces with similarly timely cultural relevance are on display.

On one wall, strollers for Octomom's eight children - six blue and two pink referencing the babies' genders - rest in a neat row.

"That has been so sensationalized," said Heinly of the coverage of Nadya Suleman, a California mother of 14 children who the media dubbed "Octomom" after she gave birth to octuplets in January.

"The coverage of that woman was just so overblown," she said. "If there is a good way to satirize it, I think Preston and Gabriel did it perfectly."

At the other end of the room sits a piece that hints at the strange circumstances surrounding the death of TV pitchman Billy Mays.

It's a statue of a plane - with a huge human nose at the tip - diving into a line of faux cocaine. The entire piece rests on a bucket of Mays' prized OxiClean detergent.

The installation references Mays' death earlier this year after bumping his head while on a plane flight. He was found to have cocaine in his system after an autopsy.

"As an artist, I wanted to stretch my wings and give artists from Philly a voice," she said. "I really wanted to do a show that I wanted to see."

Heinly said she decided to help put together the show after she saw a small, satirical piece on the "Miracle on the Hudson" - a closely averted airline disaster in the news cycle for weeks - which Boyce and Link collaborated on earlier this year.

Heinley said that, while Little Berlin opened in 2007 as a gallery space, in April, the gallery became an eight-member collective.

Neither Boyce nor Link are members of the collective, but Heinly invited the artists into the gallery after seeing some of their work.