"This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship," says a banner placed across the eyes of two people who would otherwise be seen looking out from a work by Mike Ryan hanging on a gallery wall at the Hexagon Space.

Next to that piece is another of the same size, this one by Na Kim, containing just a simple printed message: "It's hard to keep in touch."

That's not a bad summary of "Baltidelphia," an unusual mixed-media project launched with what suggests an artsy version of one of those Unification Church mass marriage ceremonies. Twenty artists from Baltimore were blindly paired up with 20 artists from Philadelphia about four months ago. The participants didn't know each other beforehand; most of them have still never met face-to-face. Only five of the pairs were unable to produce fresh art of one kind or another.

The results go on display Saturday, with simultaneous receptions at Hexagon and the equally unconventional My House Gallery in Philadelphia. Several of the young Charm City artists will attend the Philadelphia opening to see what their counterparts produced; members of the City of Brotherly Love contingent will head to Baltimore to see the Hexagon show during a closing night reception Feb. 6.

Phuong Pham (her friends call her Phu) is the gallery director at Hexagon, an all-volunteer-run venue that includes a performance space known for its concerts by indie bands. She and a friend, My House Gallery's co-founder Alex Gartelmann, started considering a joint venture months ago.

"I had the idea of asking strangers to collaborate," Phuong Pham says. "It kind of unfolded from there."

To put together the Baltimore half of the equation, she asked artists she knew and looked around for some others, listing all of them and a description of their work on a spreadsheet. She compared that grouping with Gartelmann's list and picked what seemed like promising matches.

"Then Alex and I just called everyone and said, 'Here's your partner.' We would give them an e-mail address and let them go from there," Phuong Pham says. "They were free to communicate and collaborate in any way they chose."

Sean Scheidt first heard about the project "when Phu contacted me on Facebook. The idea seemed very interesting," he says. "I typically work very quietly by myself. And I don't know anyone in Philadelphia. I like the idea of bringing two groups together."

But, as it turned out, Scheidt and his selected partner, Masha Badinter, didn't achieve much of a union.

"We would leave voice mails for each other," he says. "We only chatted three or four times via e-mail. It never got beyond that. I got frustrated. My piece ended up being about a lack of communication."

Scheidt's contribution is a stark diptych of photographs of telephone wires against a cloudy sky. "I wanted to express how we have all these ways of communicating today - Facebook, Twitter, Flickr - and we're updating them constantly, but we're not really communicating," he says. "The photos show disconnected lines spewing out data, but no sense of connectiveness."

Heather Von Marko might have faced a similar situation when she entered the project. She was matched with Philadelphia-based Hannah Heffner and promptly learned that Heffner was heading to Rwanda to work for several months - the entire time set aside for the "Baltidelphia" project - at an orphanage.

"We finally decided she would mail me - snail mail - postcards," Von Marko says. "She would put quotes on them from local people, or describe quirky things about where she was living. I got them all, about 30 postcards, at the end of the collaborative period, which was stressful."

Those postcards are the postal, not tourist, type; the only images on the plain paper were drawn by Heffner in a simple style. Von Marko has created a mobile-like work, crocheting the postcards onto a wire.

Jared Fischer didn't get to make personal contact with his Philadelphia partner, Tyler Kline - "We were going to have a phone conversation, but that never happened," he says - but relied on e-mail and snail mail to exchange ideas. Kline had proposed a "music-making sculpture," Fisher says, and sent some original music, along with visual pieces.

"I wound up making a quilt that has a narrative based on the correspondence I had with Tyler," Fischer says, "and I listened to the music he created while I was making it. After I finished, I researched more about him and found out he was much further along than I am."

The quality of the art at the Hexagon may vary, as much as the level of collaboration behind it, but that could be beside the point.

"It's really not about getting finished work on walls, but about getting artists together," Phuong Pham says. "If they just exchanged a few text messages, that's fine with me. It was an experimentation in communication. I just wanted to have fun."

If you go

The opening reception for "Baltidelphia" will be 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Saturday at Hexagon Space, 1825 N. Charles St. Free admission. For more information, go to hexagonspace.com.