FAILE in Mongolia

FAILE is an artist collective operating out of Brooklyn, and are one of my favourite voices in street art. They’ve been around for a little more than a decade, and started out as a street art crew but have been exhibiting in posh gallery settings as of late and have been playing with the boundaries of low and high art for some time with clever twists not only in subject matter, but also surface and medium. Originally founded by Patrick McNeil, Patrick Miller & Aiko Nakagawa (aka Lady Aiko), since 2006 McNeil and Miller have been pushing FAILE in new directions.

Back in 2008 FAILE put on a show in London,England with Lazarides Gallery, Lost in Glimmering Shadows.

FAILE Eat With the Wolf print – from “Lost in Glimmering Shadows”

Faile’s work takes the visual vocabulary of popular culture, urban decay and consumer excess, and reworks them into new, exciting and sometimes troubling narratives for the viewer. Layers of posters torn away from walls or comic book-inspired remixes, Faile’s instantly recognizable practice refers to a visual culture that is sometimes disposable, yet demands serious attention. Lost in Glimmering Shadows features a new series of paintings and sculptures which explore an ambivalent attitude to the hypermodern culture of today’s USA. As well as incorporating images and texts from the chaos of the modern urban landscape, the works use imagery, stories and patterns from Native American Indian culture. A metaphor of sorts emerges in this juxtaposition; the expanse of contemporary commercialism at the expense of society’s connection with nature and spirit.
– Lost in Glimmering Shadows Press Release (link to pdf)

This year, FAILE has taken the imagery from Lost in Glimmering Shadows into a whole new realm by bringing their imagery to Mongolia.

Patrick Miller: We made this sculpture, which is of an image we did in 2009 called “Eat With the Wolf” and it’s sort of this businessman tearing away a suit, wearing a wolf pelt. He’s placed in their national park, Ulan Bator. Behind the sculpture is this mountain preserve and then he’s looking on to all this new development. So this will all be a grassline, 1600 acre park. It’s wild to have a permanent sculpture in this city.

It’s pretty amazing. It really couldn’t have been a better sort of symbolic thing of what’s happening in Mongolia right now. Basically, they’ve come across all these minerals in mining, copper and gold, and the Russians and the Chinese are descending upon Mongolia to really try and mine the shit out of it. It’s sort like, what’s gonna happen to the city and how will the people actually benefit this? Or will the country just be mined for its resources and kind of left as a shell? So there are a lot of these issues going on there right now, which made this sculpture feel pretty timely.

This image came out of a series we did called “Lost in Glimmering Shadows” and it was sort of imagining if Native Americans had come back to the city today and retaken the land. This image was really about this crisis within of battling between greed and a connection to nature. So we’d been working on this sculpture for awhile on its own with Charlie Becker, who’s a sculptor we work with a lot, and Tiger Translate and the Mongolian Arts Council approached us and asked if we’d be interested in doing a sculpture out there which essentially led to doing that.
-interview with FAILE, Caroline Caldwell viaVandalog

FAILE – the Wolf Within (2012 Ulan Bator)

FAILE got up to some collaborative work with local artists while there, too, which you can read more about in the Vandalog article. It’s all pretty impressive.  You can see this and much, much more of  FAILE on their website.