Country: Brooklyn, NYC

FAILE is the Brooklyn-based artistic collaboration between Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller. Since its inception in 1999, FAILE has been known for a wide ranging multimedia practice recognizable for its explorations of duality through a fragmented style of appropriation and collage. The two close collaborators grew up together in Arizona, USA during the 1970s and began working together in New York in the late 1990s.

From their beginnings stenciling and wheat-pasting collages made from pulp imagery, including fliers for underground music acts and specialist prostitutes, to their incredibly successful print editions inspired by comic book culture, to the ambitious architectural works such as The FAILE Temple and giant sculpture The Wolf Within, FAILE have constantly evolved their unique artistic style. The forms of expression they chose seem contradictory – arcade machines and traditional American quilts for example. But they are a reminder that progressive subcultures like urban art often spotlight that which can be found lacking in mainstream thinking.

While painting and printmaking remain central to their approach, over the past decade FAILE has adapted its signature mass culture-driven iconography to vast array of materials and techniques, from wooden boxes and window pallets to more traditional canvas, prints, sculptures, stencils, installation, and prayer wheels. FAILE’s work is constructed from found visual imagery, and blurs the line between “high” and “low” culture, but recent exhibitions demonstrate an emphasis on audience participation, a critique of consumerism, and the incorporation of iconoclastic media, architecture, and site-specific/archival research into their work.

www.faile.net

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