chashama presents Oh, Pooh…, by Jo Yarrington.

Installed in the two large sets of windows to the east of the main entry of the former Donnell Library is a translucent photographic image depicting a magnified close-up of honeycombs overlaid with the cracks and lines of shattered glass that radiate outward from a gaping bullet hole. At the center of the opening is an image of the original Piglet doll, which viewers will be able to see when they approach the windows and peer within.

Displayed behind bulletproof glass, Kanga, Eeyore, Tigger, Piglet and Pooh had called the Children’s Reading Room on 53rd Street their home since 1988 when A.A. Milne’s publisher E. P. Dutton donated the original dolls to the library. These tattered toys found themselves at the center of a hot, political debate ten years later as British and New York politicians publicly fought over the rightful home for Winnie and his friends. Though couched in terms of innocence and playtime, the debate literally stuffed these anthropomorphized animals with issues that spoke more to history, diaspora, and world powers than to honey pots and The Hundred Acre Wood.

Jo Yarrington’s drawing, photographs, and architecturally-based installations have been shown in exhibitions at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Yale University, Museum of Glass, WA, Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, Trinity Museum, NY, DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, MA, Artists Space, NY.

International exhibitions have included Galeria Sala Uno, Italy, Centro de las Artes de Guanajuato, Mexico, Christuskirche, Germany, Glasgow School of Art, Scotland. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Pollock Krasner Foundation, MacDowell Colony, SIMS/ Iceland, American Scandinavian Foundation, Brandywine Institute, Pennsylvania Council for the Arts and Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism.

In 2001, she represented the United States at the Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates, in 2010 she won the Bronze Prize at the International Biennal Exhibition of Photographic Art, Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje, Macedonia. She lives and works in NYC and Norwalk, CT.