Ampersand is pleased to present What to Want, a solo exhibition of collages and a new collection of poems by New York poet and artist Scott Zieher. Citing a multitude of art historical, literary, musical and ancestral deposits, Zieher likens his collages (and longer recent poems) to a tablet on which the ambiguity of disparate influences take on equally ambiguous forms. "If they document anything," says Zieher of his collages, "they document my own obsession with paper (my grandfather and uncles worked at Nekoosa Paper Mills in Port Edwards, Wisconsin), salesmanship, (my Dad sold plumbing fixtures, regionally), office supplies (my mom was secretary to the principal of my junior high school and her desk framed an enormous vault of school supplies), jazz, baseball, Gotham, taverns, bowling, nightclubs, magazines, race forms, postcards, etc." His collages are loose but sculptural, uncouth and unkempt, improvised yet controlled, meaningless while sincere, gestural but always within the lines of a precise style that is unmistakably his own.

This singularity of voice and style is rooted in Zieher's work as a poet. The collages, in a sense, are visual primers for a poetic world that is dense, stylistically variegated and full of allusions to literary forebears, midwest mythologies and a lineage of ancestors (real or imagined) that are the meat of his story making. Designed and published by Ampersand, Zieher’s fourth volume of poetry, What to Want, is a collection of 39 poems spanning 25 years. Divided in half, between invented memories of a dead father (and a middle-American heritage forever out of reach) and the eventual passing of his mother, Zieher moves between the vernacular of small-town Americana’s inevitable loneliness and loss and the latent bliss of ancestor worship in the incessant anachronism of New York City. Published in conjunction with a small-edition pamphlet of select collages from the exhibition, What to Want is a culmination of lyrical assemblages in two mediums.

Scott Zieher was born in Waukesha, Wisconsin in 1965 and received his MFA in poetry from Columbia University’s School of the Arts in 1996. He is co-owner of ZieherSmith, an art gallery established in 2003 and dedicated to the work of emerging and contemporary artists in all media. His collages are represented by Judith Charles Gallery in New York City and Ampersand here in Portland. His poetry has been published in The Iowa Review and The Believer and his art has been featured in Manor House Quarterly and The Pornographers, a novel by Christopher Grimes (Jaded Ibis, 2012). He was a founding member of Emergency Press and is the author of articles on contemporary art for numerous international publications, including the book Band of Bikers (powerHouse, 2010), a collection of found photography from the early 1970s. He lives and works in New York City.


Please email request (here) for price list of all available works.

Untitled, 2014
Collage on paper
12 x 9 in.
SZ_021
SOLD