Amalgamate show (June 29, 2012) was sponsored by the FLUX Hawaii magazine as part of the Find Art festival in Chinatown, Honolulu.

The juried show criteria was to "underscore the collaborative process and the act of combining disparate elements to forge something new. Entries should respond to the concepts of coming together, forming a network, coalescing."

I submitted the following two pieces, and HAPA FACE II was accepted. (Hapa in Hawaiian means "of mixed blood, person of mixed blood.")

HAPA FACE I - The Unnamed and The Unknown (8.5 x 11 in., laser print on transparency)

Artist Statement

After running a face recognition scan on my photos, the sheer number of persons that the software identified took me by surprise. There were also people that appeared in the background of the photographs, which I had never noticed, but now they were discovered, uncovered and exposed by the software. Even after limiting the images to recent years in Honolulu, there were many persons that I had never seen or met—and yet I was being asked to name them or optionally leave them classified as "The Unnamed or The Unknown."

Instead, I superimposed the unnamed and the unknowns to create a new set of faces—who now will never be named or known!

HAPA FACE II - The Self and The Others (8.5 x 11 in., laser print on transparency)

Artist Statement

I was annoyed by the "social app" that was constantly asking me to name the faces that were detected on my computer. As a reaction, I superimposed these faces onto images of myself to create a new set of faces, who will now remain nameless forever.

These fun and rather bizarre depictions represent the interactions within my social circles in Chinatown, Honolulu.