Joel Allegretti – “For Immediate Release: House of Goodbye” Opens at Museum of Enteric Representation

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

“HOUSE OF GOODBYE” OPENS
AT MUSEUM OF ENTERIC REPRESENTATION

The Museum of Enteric Representation today announced the opening of “House of Goodbye,” an installation by the theoretical artist and architect Nicholas Σ. The exhibition runs through 5 p.m. tomorrow, at which time Σ and a team of his students will destroy it in the presence of museum visitors.

The piece occupies the entire first floor and half of the second. The second-floor portion is closed to the public. The artist, however, has created “Goodbye Means Goodbye,” a set of 501 23” x 29” multiples featuring black-and-white photographs of that section of the work. They are available on the second-floor landing at no charge.

Elaborating on the impetus for “House of Goodbye,” Σ writes in an artist’s statement, “Here is the room of the bed of final things. Where a lifetime’s cookie jar of dreams and wishes is the last word of the last sentence of a paragraph. Science has advanced from background music to a concert program for a rapt audience. Religion is the coda, the diminishing strain as the bow decelerates across the violin strings. Silence, as John Cage knew, is itself a form of composition, notably when a lifetime’s cookie jar of dreams and wishes is the last word of the last sentence of a paragraph that strives to describe the room of the bed of final things.”

The Museum of Enteric Representation is planning a retrospective of Σ’s aerosol sculptures.

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Joel Allegretti is the author of three collections, most recently Thrum, a chapbook of poems and prose poems about musical instruments. His second collection, Father Silicon, was selected by The Kansas City Star as one of 100 Noteworthy Books of 2006, a list that included novels by Cormac McCarthy and Thomas Pynchon. His work has appeared in many national journals and was the basis of two song cycles composed by Naxos artist Frank Ezra Levy.  Allegretti is a member of the Academy of American Poets and ASCAP.