What to Want: Collages

Published by Ampersand Editions with Zieher's 2014 exhibition at Ampersand in Oregon, What to Want collects collages the artist describes as loose but sculptural, uncouth and unkempt, improvised yet controlled.

Zieher's raw materials are the paper sediment of small-town American life — salesmanship, office supplies, jazz, baseball, taverns, bowling, magazines, race forms, postcards — worked into compositions that stay close to the scavenged page. The publication appeared in four companion forms: Poems, Collages, a combined Poems & Collages, and a deluxe edition the collages share the book with the concerns of his fourth poetry collection, whose 39 poems circle invented memories of a dead father and the loneliness and loss of small-town Americana.

Zieher (b. 1965, Waukesha, Wisconsin) took his MFA in poetry at Columbia and co-founded the New York gallery ZieherSmith his collage and poetry practices have run in parallel for decades, each feeding the other's economy of salvage.