NYAB Event - Scott Zieher “Concrete Poet”

Scott Zieher “Concrete Poet”

Judith Charles Gallery

This event has ended.

The title CONCRETE POET seemed to make clear my general approach to a first solo exhibition after 20 years of making art with no thought toward corralling what I made into anything coherent, all while simultaneously writing poetry. I’ve had to reconcile the two impulses in some way, and the way to most effectively eliminate any distraction was to make them one. The collages themselves consist primarily of paper I’ve found walking the streets of New York with an eye to the ground. I have always carried a notebook around, and I walk a lot, so I see a lot of discarded books and magazines, and both approaches are fed simultaneously in that way. Since childhood I’ve been a scavenger, and an argument could be made that my poetry is sometimes an act of hunting and gathering. Specifically, finding a 20 foot tall pile of late 60’s through late 70’s architecture magazines fueled this body of collages. I’ve only gone through about half of them. Because there is something architectonic about the idea behind concrete poetry (for me), I see another allusion to both practices in the actual source material. Each fragment, or part, builds on itself if nothing else. And my writing is a decided collage process. So these confluences make the decision to twin the two impulses fairly straightforward. I think the term concrete poetry is really enticing on a lot of levels, but here I’m thinking of the visual as a plastic, layered poem as object. My approach is formal first, finding a fluid line or a color pairing that clicks, shuffling them into two shapes seeking a third, like words or lines or stanzas in need of company.

In addition to a steady practice of making collage, Scott Zieher is an accomplished poet. He won the 2004 Emergency Press book contest for his book-length poem, VIRGA. His second book-length poem, IMPATIENCE was published by Emergency Press in 2009 and in February 2010, powerHouse Books published BAND OF BIKERS, a widely praised collection of found photographs from 1972 with an essay by the poet. Zieher’s recent written work has appeared in The Believer, Jubilat, KNOCK and The Iowa Review. Born in Waukesha, Wisconsin, he received his MFA in poetry from Columbia University in 1996 and won the 2009 University of Wisconsin at Waukesha Outstanding Alumni Award. He is also co-owner of the contemporary art gallery ZieherSmith.