Tracy Truong, receptionist for Resource Suites, a provider of office solutions in Waikiki, spends her days surrounded by challenging contemporary art curated by Carolyn Mirante for Gallery of Hawai‘i Artists. But she wasn’t prepared for "Boys Don’t Cry," a large-scale photographic portrait by artist Dana Paresa. who appears as a filthy, battered female hobo with her belongings bundled at the end of a stick and an empty but withering gaze.

We’ve all felt like a painting or photograph is watching us, but Truong requested that the image be taken down, as it was simply too overwhelming to sit with all day. Fortunately for her, not all of the show’s images are this large —which is the show’s one minor weakness.

Nevertheless, the intensity achieved is worth celebrating, and Paresa’s vagabond joins a diverse cast of carnivalesque, hallucinatory, fantastic and startling characters created and imaged by herself, DB Amorin and Kate Burlingame.

"Single World’s" collection of surreal photographs are less self-portraits than they are portraits of the artists’ other selves. Call Burlingame the witchy mystic, Amorin the noise colorist and Paresa the trickster tita.

Their work draws clear lines to photographer Cindy Sherman, known for fictionalized self-portraits that explore U.S. visual culture ranging from film noir to high school yearbooks. Similarly, these three work with makeup, costume, locations and sets to create moments that are windows into a blend of bygone eras, apocalyptic backwaters and the early stages of media that exist or haven’t yet been invented.

Burlingame’s "An Old Man Is a Bag Full of Bones" features a rifle-wielding character that mashes up the blankets and leather fringe of Southwestern cowboyism with chunky silver bling that could be from India, and the feathered hat of an archetypal local guide.

The halo-like feathered headdress and beads she wears in "Mucha’s Autumn," and the Mexican Day of the Dead festival queen she portrays in "O Século," also network with other ethnicities and cultural traditions. However, Burlingame is not "dressing up." The references she makes to these "others" are gates of arrival or departure for the new entities she assembles in these moments.

Like Burlingame, Amorin devotes attention to color, texture and lighting, but his characters are more abstract. Whether wrapped in bands of colored strips, using data projectors to simultaneously paint his face and create a background, or manipulating scrims and basic white makeup, the personalities he captures are iconic, vaguely tragic and possibly allegorical.

Where Burlingame’s cultural links are explicit, with Amorin they are metaphors for other states of being.

The three-image sequence called "Everything in Modulation" begins with two figures contemplating a cascade of colored ribbon. The second image’s male figure struggles with this waterfall as it entangles him. The third image presents the results: a desultory figure with his head completely wrapped, evoking both turbans and burqas.

A sense of mediation, signal, data and transmission permeates Amorin’s work. In "Rave Aches" he looks like a host for a television show broadcast from one’s subconscious, while the figure in "Channel Fifth Corner" prays in a low-fi temple in which symbolism has been reduced to crude circuitry.

This returns us to Paresa, whose approach is raw. The atmosphere of her images is stark and confrontational.

Paresa uses an underlying beauty as a medium to be manipulated, distorted and challenged. Whether mashing her face against glass in some horrible clinical moment ("Pressed Face 1 & 2") or preparing to administer a brutal biomechanical procedure ("Ms. Piggie"), Paresa’s characters come from the "classical" neighborhoods of the subconscious where sex and nightmares live. One can understand why Truong wasn’t comfortable with a poster-size image.

"Single World" is engaging and effective because it speaks a visual pidgin of ritual, cinema, fashion and ethnography.

The artists’ characters do not represent Hawaii, but are all the more significant for having been produced here. This work is about questioning and presenting contemporary identity that is as complex for any of us as it is for them.

For these artists to emerge from the Windward side of Oahu without representing a recognizable "sense of place" in ethnic, historical, political or ecological terms speaks volumes about the multitude of possible futures for Hawaii.