FAILE: artist profile, layered imagery and public installations

FAILE is the Brooklyn-based artistic collaboration of Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller. Their work brings together popular imagery, lettering and fragments of visual culture in compositions that move between printmaking, painting, sculpture and installation. Graphic motifs recur across handmade surfaces, assemblies and settings. Library Street Collective documents that vocabulary and the duo’s approach to constructing work.

Street beginnings and a layered visual language

FAILE’s early stencil campaigns and pasted posters remain a reference point for the studio practice. STRAAT Museum’s Between the Sheets exhibition traced that connection through original prints, monoprints, handmade sheets and larger installations. The museum presented archival work alongside new compositions, showing the continued relevance of the paper-based methods associated with the collaboration’s beginnings.

Layering operates in more than one way. Images and words share a composition without resolving into a single straightforward story, while the physical construction can also join separate parts. For Size of the Fight in Detroit in 2017, FAILE made paintings from individually painted woodblocks assembled into larger works. Library Street Collective describes the resulting surfaces in relation to patchwork and American folk art. This gives the dense imagery an underlying structure: the block is both a surface for a picture and a component in a larger arrangement. Exhibition and process record.

Prints, textiles and objects in space

The work extends beyond framed pictures. Between the Sheets included three fabric columns made for STRAAT, bringing printed imagery into a vertical installation. Its combination of paper and textile helps explain why a collector encountering FAILE through an edition is seeing one part of a wider practice, rather than a separate commercial style. The same exhibition placed that material development alongside the duo’s history of street work. STRAAT Museum.

Underdogs’ Something To Believe In viewing room documents another cross-section: painting, wood, textile and sculpture appear together, including columns, banners and prayer-wheel forms. The gallery connects their fragmented imagery and symbolic references to urban visual culture and ritual. These objects invite attention to how an image is encountered in space as well as to what it depicts.

Collecting through material and process

FAILE’s varied production makes medium a useful organising principle for a collection. Compare a printed sheet with an assembled wood work or a textile object, and consider how repetition functions differently in each. Recurring imagery can connect them without making the objects interchangeable.

The gallery records also distinguish unique works from numbered editions. That distinction should remain attached to the specific object, together with its support and production method. Seen across those formats, FAILE’s continuity lies in the meeting of familiar graphic fragments, physical texture and recombination; individual release specifications belong to the record of each work.