Faile

Faile is an art duo of Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller. What started out as just a small idea, turned out to be a partnership that has been going strong for over 20 years. Their art is created with a punk sensibility, perfectly blended with visualizing hybridity and metamorphosis. Faile's practice includes painting, printmaking, digital illustration, and drawing ‒ inspired by history, culture, and family, and responding to community stories, current affairs, and social media. Filled with light, space, historical undertones, material obsessions, and visual ambiguity, their art is a mix of neo-pop art and punk.

Their name is an anagram of their first project, “A life.” 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. While painting and printmaking remain central to their approach, over the past decade FAILE has adapted its signature mass culture-driven iconography to a vast array of materials and techniques, from wooden boxes and window pallets to more traditional canvas, prints, sculptures, stencils, installation, and prayer wheels.

Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller met when they were fourteen years old, in high school, and just kind of shared a common interest in art all through high school and shared art classes together. When they went off to college together they both went to the same university and lived together for the first year and studied fine art together. Faile has exhibited all over the world: From the Air We Share, Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Strasbourg, France Little By Little, SNCF Railway Station, Strasbourg, France, Stages, Galerie Springmann, Berlin, Germany Meet Me Halfway, Magda Danysz Gallery, Paris, France Size of the Fight, Library Street Collective, Detroit, MI, Strong Currents, Gordon Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel, Catch One’s Heart, Never Tear Us Apart, Magda Danysz Gallery, Shanghai, China, Savage/Sacred Young Minds, Brooklyn Museum.