PATRICK MCNEIL: That door is like the jam, dude.
PATRICK MILLER: Totally, right?
PATRICK MCNEIL: It's so good.
PATRICK MILLER: Yeah, it's fun.
PATRICK MCNEIL: The door is--
PATRICK MILLER: When the pink goes in, it's going to be
really nice.
PATRICK MCNEIL: We should have almost brought those black
tiles in there.
The idea was to tile the facade of a building.
So we had to find a building to tile.
This one just seemed to suit the project the best because
of its size and its location.
PATRICK MILLER: The influence for the wall and other
influences we're seeing almost the way graffiti builds up and
the way it gets buffed in these sort of geometric color
field abstract-like paintings.
And we're sort of bringing together all those elements
from within our practice to things that we see and are
inspired by from advertising, signage,
color, street, New York.
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PATRICK MILLER: We started FAILE in 1999.
And it really started as a collaboration of printmaking
and soaked large format monoprint silkscreens.
And it just kind of evolved from there.
It's something we had talked about for a long time.
I think even in high school and before, we'd always talked
about this idea of collaboration and working like
a band almost.
PATRICK MCNEIL: When I first moved to New York, it was like
England times 10.
It was just like saturated with graffiti and street art
and all these kinds of crazy things.
And I just started documenting it in the beginning, and
taking photos of it, and talking to Pat about it, and
was really inspired by the art form.
I was like, you've got to come down here and check out what's
going on here on the street.
It's really interesting.
PATRICK MILLER: I think we've always been attracted to sort
of one collaging appropriation, found work, and
ephemera from the last hundred years.
Seeing those things that are lost in some random advert
page from a magazine 50 years ago and sort of tying a little
piece of that back into something
that's happening today.
And then, multiplying that by 20.
PATRICK MCNEIL: A lot of our prints we'll print, and then
there's a lot of hand painting.
And there's a lot of multiple printing that
takes place in it.
And then from there, it's like you get your final print.
Once you do on top and just kind of finding things that
you can't get from a silkscreen, like the brush
stroke, getting those gestures happening in it.
So there's a lot of hand crafting over printing and
things that happens in our printing process.
The more layering and the more beat up it gets, it seems the
better the print becomes.
You can get prints to a certain place where it's just
like, you work it and you fight it and it
just looks like crap.
And you do that one more layer and it changes everything.
And you're like, wow, this one's my favorite one.
This one's dope.
PATRICK MILLER: Over the years, it's evolved not only
the processes, but also the materials that we're using.
Working on the street, you come across a lot of wood and
found bits and bobs.
And it just sort of naturally incorporates
itself into the work.
The abstraction that's played out in sort of starting with
doing some of the rips and abstracting in that way and
layering up, really started to lend itself to the blocks and
the wood, and sort of this idea of building up these
layers and being able to sort of move
bits and pieces around.
And you had this one little block in there that you can
focus in on and see.
And it's got its own little meaning to it, but then you
back up and see the whole piece.
PATRICK MCNEIL: With a canvas, when you paint a canvas,
you're kind of stuck with where you're at on the piece.
It's a much more committed process.
With the blocks, there's that flexibility to put it
together, deconstruct it, put it back together with LEGO.
PATRICK MILLER: In the ferry wheel, this is really the
simple idea--
Native Americans came back and retook the city
that was once theirs.
From there, it just really made us look at things like,
what do we pray for?
Kind of creating a tactile experience from the work and
letting that come alive a bit more.
PATRICK MCNEIL: This is one of the machines that was left
from Deluxx Fluxx New York.
PATRICK MILLER: We had a show coming up and we had asked our
good friend Bast to be involved in it.
And we all sat down in his studio and just sort of
started battering around ideas.
We got on arcades and we just started thinking about like,
wow, that would be really amazing to take sort of this
concept and see what would happen if FAILE and Bast
tackled it.
PATRICK MCNEIL: It was probably the funnest show.
I loved hanging out in there.
Normally it's like you finish a show and you're
done and you leave.
And there was a retrospective going on that night.
And we went to the retrospective and everybody's
sipping wine.
And we're like, let's get the hell out of here and head back
to the arcade.
PATRICK MILLER: There's very few times you do a show where
people walk in and almost every single person leaves
with a huge smile on their face.
And they're going to bring a friend back.
I was thinking this we could snip off,
this little duck tail.
PATRICK MCNEIL: Sure.
PATRICK MILLER: We both have different strengths.
We both have different interests even, within the
work, which is probably, actually, one of the most
successful things about it.
Sort of the things I'm focused on or thinking about and the
things that Pat's focused on and thinking about aren't
always the same.
And we can sort of bounce that off each other.
And then all of a sudden, you get excited.
It's like, oh, I never even thought of that.
Then, all of a sudden-- it just kind of keeps reeling off
each other.
And two minds are better than one, I guess.
Go over there.
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1986?
The temple, it was sort of shocking in the sense that we
were the architects and engineers and the artists and
the designers for a lot of things that we
never normally do.
And just, it was sort of all in for two years.
PATRICK MCNEIL: A lot of it was a dialogue that we had
with one of our colleagues in Portugal, and getting back to
this idea of like loss crafts.
And when we saw the tiles and there was like a thousand of
these hand painted tiles and you know every single one of
them has been hand painted.
There's just a beauty, and each one's different.
I think we got kind of wowed by tiles in Portugal.
PATRICK MILLER: It's also sort of about, how do you evolve
street art a little bit?
How do you give people this sort of unexpected experience
where they stumble upon something and all of a sudden
everything's just turned enough to really make you stop
and take a longer look?
All these little nods that, I mean, when you sort of look at
the world like a child again, it sort of takes you to this
other place.
PATRICK MCNEIL: I wanted to learn this so
I could do my bathroom.
I got a house with a tiny little bathroom in it that I
want to do.
And I didn't know how to tile or cut tile.
So now I know.
PATRICK MILLER: I mean, the temple is really its own
concrete idea.
But the idea was to keep using elements from the temple in
different ways-- the tiles being a big part of that.
Doing it first in Brooklyn, in our backyard, is a good spot.
I think there are somewhere around 9,000, 8,000 tiles.
PATRICK MCNEIL: And then there's two type treatments.
You got vanity and perfect.
PATRICK MILLER: The other hand painted tiles are just sort of
inspired by Native American designs and things we see on
the street, other things from our work.
Some are just more traditional designs.
The FAILE 1986 tile really comes from the spatial
challenger We've used 1986 and Challenger in our work for a
long time now.
The Challenger sort of made this end of innocence impact
on us as kids.
So 1986 has really lived in our work ever since then as
something that you grow from, you move beyond your failures
to succeed and grow.
PATRICK MCNEIL: Everything's kind of a lineage of process.
I don't think we would have been at the tiles had we not
done the puzzle boxes.
Everything kind of connects and flows to one another.
PATRICK MILLER: And it just all clicked.
Everything just sort of like came together.
And I think it opened up a lot of new possibilities.
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