Annie Sessler, John Todaro & Sarah Jaffe Turnbull at Ashawagh Hall

On Saturday and Sunday October 17th and 18th, Annie Sessler, John Todaro and Sarah Jaffe Turnbull will be showing their work at Ashawagh Hall in East Hampton. Annie is a fish-printmaker from Montauk, John is a photographer from East Hampton and Sarah is a sculptor and printmaker from Bridgehampton.

Ashawagh Hall is located at 780 Springs-Fireplace Road in East Hampton, three miles north of the village. The hall is within walking distance of the Springs General Store and the Pollock/Krasner House.

For nearly 9 years Annie Sessler’s monoprints inspired by traditional japanese Gyotaku, or fish printing, involved only the addition of hand painted eyes and her signature chop after the prints had dried.

Within the past two years she has also shown and offered fine inkjet reproductions of these images altering only their size and the materials they are printed on. In this show new works will be introduced that use the hand rubbed fish impression as just the starting point, in which alterations and transformations are welcomed and may even dominate, breaking the imagery free from its usual constraints. This exhibit will include traditional originals, fine reproductions, and these new works.

John Todaro studied with master printer Anthony Nobile in Northport in the 1970’s. He also worked as an assistant to the curator at Sagamore Hill National Historic Site where he catalogued thousands of historic images. His work has been widely displayed and collected, and published by Unicef, the East Hampton Star, the New Yorker, Crain’s New York Business and other magazines. John will be displaying new work in both black and white and color, along with a series of recent botanical abstractions. In addition, he’ll be showing a collection of miniatures, images which recall nineteenth century photography.

Sarah Jaffe Turnbull has been making ceramic sculpture in the recent years, beginning with a series of heads, and then moving into abstract architectonic structural pieces. She will be showing a group of wall plaques which imagine the surface of the dwarf planets. She finds the properties of clay magical and flexible, moving from almost fluid to solid. Her work continues to be exhibited in numerous shows and was chosen for the recent Long Island Biennial at the Heckscher Museum in Huntington.