Revel Woodard received his BA from Bard college in 2005, and has since exhibited his work in many New York shows, notably in the Bruce High Quality’s Brucennial exhibitions in 2007 and 2010, and Smithumenta 2009. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Revel’s piece in Piles, Untitled, is a heap of cardboard atop a plastic ventilated system attached to a guitar and amplifier, which produces a rising and falling motion and a sound similar to human breath. This inert, yet breathing, mass seems to personify the way people can pour their personalities and lives into accumulation, and how possessions and foreign objects in some ways become representations of who we are. On the other hand, it is readily apparent that there are no real human mechanisms involved with the work–the noise that sounds like breathing actually comes from a guitar, which is being ‘played’ by the sighing cardboard. The absence of the body is drawn into the foreground, and the sculpture consequently speaks strongly about materialism and sustainability in contemporary life.
Untitled, 2006
