FAILE

FAILE is a Brookly-based artistic collaboration between Patrick McNeil (born 1975) and Patrick Miller (born 1976). Since its inception in 1999, FAILE has been known for a wide-ranging multimedia practice recognisable for its explorations of duality through a fragmented style of appropriation and collage.

While painting and printmaking remain central to their approach, over the past decade FAILE has adapted its signature mass culture-driven iconography to an 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 religious media, architecture, and site-specific/archival research into their work.

Faile take their inspiration from the detritus of city walls, using the decay of advertising and flyposting to provide a platform to present their own take on the world of found imagery.

From initially wheatpasting screen printed posters on the streets of New York and major world cities, they progressed to the more permanent medium of stencil graffiti. Their instantly recognisable pop culture images in posters and stencils have allowed Faile to diversify into other areas encompassing fine art, sculpture, design, fashion, music, and housewares. Despite this, the core of their work remains printmaking, stencilling, and painting.