Faile
ART (USA)
FAILE (Pronounced “fail”) is a Brooklyn-based artistic collaboration between Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller. Since its inception in 1999, FAILE is known for their pioneering use of wheatpasting and stenciling in the increasingly established arena of street art, and for their explorations of duality through a fragmented style of appropriation and collage. During this time, FAILE adapted its signature mass culture-driven iconography to a wide array of media, from wooden boxes and window pallets to more traditional canvas, prints, sculptures, stencils, multimedia installation, and prayer wheels. While FAILE’s work is constructed from found visual imagery, and blurs the line between “high” and “low” culture, recent exhibitions demonstrate an emphasis on audience participation, a critique of consumerism, and the incorporation of religious media and architecture into their work. If creating a five-story-high art installation in collaboration with the New York City Ballet means that you’ve arrived, then FAILE has arrived. Made out of 2,500 hand-paint boxes, the structure is the culmination of a decade of work that has been elevated from the flypasted street-corners of Brooklyn to prestigious galleries around the world. Lauded by the Wooster Collective, FAILE’s grimy, chaotic pieces are assembled from re-appropriated pop-imagery, packaging and the ephemera of the 20th century. FAILE is a giant of an urban art movement.
