Max Protetch Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Oliver Herring. Teens With Masks includes large-scale photographic collages and a video, both of which Both the large-scale photographic collages that make up Teens with Masks and the action in the video Make Believe in Regent Park are heavily influenced by a teenage obsession with play violence.

The pieces are among the products of workshops Herring has conducted with teenagers in the last several years related to the self-generating platform TASK, which he facilitates for people in order to provide an open-ended and adventurous outlet for them to express themselves. The TASK workshops sometimes later provide material for Herring’s layered and often labor-intensive work in the studio and the editing room.

The collages Teens with Masks are portraits of teenagers who worked with Herring in his studio during the summer of 2007. Herring took portraits of the teenagers following a TASK workshop in which they enacted a randomly-drawn task which instructed them to “Make a knife and kill someone.” Herring later embellished each unique portrait in the studio, building up relief-like areas from museum board and reflective photographic paper to create intricate patterns and varying levels of abstraction based on the photographic image.

Make Believe in Regent Park was filmed in a housing project largely populated by immigrant communities in Toronto. The teenagers that took part in this project largely controlled the action in front of the camera. The playful engagement among the mostly Muslim teenagers from different cultures is characterized by a breakdown of traditional gender roles, Rambo-like fight scenes and self-made music.

Herring wishes to thank the students that were part of the Youth and Community Programs of the Whitney Museum in 2007 and the teenagers who took part in Streetscape as part of Toronto’s Luminato festival in 2008.