Can you talk a bit about how this exhibit came about? You didn’t really have an idea of what space you were going to show in when you started, did you?

Patrick Miller: We were talking potentially about doing an alternative space when we started. Normally, we come in and determine the wall space and what size pieces we want to do, and then just build the body of work into this. As far as the work, though, we just produced and then when we were done we brought in everything and edited it. Normally there’s not a lot of editing that goes on in these shows. There’s a little bit perhaps in the studio, but you just pre-plan and stuff usually just fits in. In this case we did a lot of editing.

Patrick McNeil:  Yeah right! We hadn’t really done whitewall gallery space. I think it does introduce it to a different crowd of people in a way.

Patrick McNeil:  Right. After seeing Shepherd’s show at Deitch on whitewalls, we thought, “there’s something nice and clean about this.”

Patrick Miller: I felt that the work would fit well in that space, so let’s just use it.

Patrick McNeil: It lets it stand out a little more. This show is so different in the sense that so often it’s about creating a set of images that are based around a theme or tied into something bigger on that level. With this show we just really wanted to get back to cut and paste, being loose, having fun. We were really inspired by a lot of old punk fliers and that kind of thing. So it gave us the opportunity on the image side to be loose. In “Lost Glimmering Shadows” it was amazing to have that bigger concept driving the whole thing, but this was really nice.

Patrick Miller: It’s more about the process.

Patrick McNeil:  Right.  And then so it led to the actual physical side of the pieces, and the paintings were really process oriented. The medium drove the message in a way. It was about playing in the studio and seeing how you could deconstruct the images in a new way and push and pull color.

Patrick Miller:  We would wash the blocks and then dump them out on the table after we were done treating them and then they’d be all jumbled and we’d look at them and think “wow, that abstraction of that image is great.”

Patrick McNeil:  It was kind of great in that way in the studio because we made so many blocks and we would edit them out, and then pull them back into other pieces so sometimes you just need to get them out of the way, and you set them together in a frame and all of a sudden they would make more sense.

Patrick Miller:  Or you would be organizing them while working on a piece and rather than looking at a pile of all these colored blocks, you would start seeing all the blues or all the purples and suddenly you’d have these organized color fields.

Patrick McNeil:  Totally.

Patrick Miller:   No it’s all good.  We spent a lot of time at the gallery moving things around the space to see what feels right.  There are pieces I would have liked to see hung, but some are displayed alone, hung in the office for example, and it’s nice to see them on their own too, and it’s nice to take some away.

Patrick McNeil:  It’s the same when you frame a print.  It comes to life in its own way and lighting it makes a difference.

Is that something you like to have present? Is music an important part of creating for you guys?

Patrick Miller: A lot of times, but then sometimes everybody just need quiet time. Its funny at the beginning getting ready for the show, there was always lot of music, but the last few weeks it was off.

Patrick McNeil: Our work is definitely this cultural combine. It takes so much together and fumbles it up and edits it down and filters it.

Patrick Miller: It’s a lot like music composing and song and collaboration for the "Deluxx Fluxx" show. We really got to work with music and sound. It was about how could you turn FAILE into some kind of music and vast experience and fit the art well. The games really let us do that. That was a really great experience.

Do you two find inspiration from living here in New York? And what impact do you feel that has on your work?

Patrick McNeil:  That’s a huge part of the work. At the end of the day when you’re going to bed at night and you have all those bits and pieces of sound and image mixed in your brain, like a crazy montage. These pieces really reflected that. It’s fragments built in creating one cohesive image, but all these bits and pieces from the day.

I also heard it compared to dreams which I thought was interesting.

Patrick McNeil:  Yes, like the bedtime stories. You wake up from a dream, and you can never really put it all quite together. You just have these random moments. Another thing that was really inspiring to us was quilt-making. About 2 years ago, we were really focusing a lot on quilts, and I think a lot of the research I did on these pieces is there really is something about taking that quilting:  the pattern and busting it apart. I think it’s this weird mix of electronic meets a very handmade soft touch. It’s just all those pieces together.

Was traveling a bigger part of it?

Patrick Miller:  It was everything. It was part of the FAILE lifestyle. Get the exhibition. Get them to pay for your flight and your accommodations. Then go do the show.  hen get a bunch of work up on the street.

Patrick McNeil: The worst was the point at which the auction houses were getting involved. You’d have Sotheby’s taking a door from the street. That is really defeating on a very mass level.  Back in the day you didn’t really worry about it. A lot of work went on wood, and those were great surfaces to work on . . .

Patrick Miller:  … on doors or cinder block walls…

Patrick McNeil:  . . . and now you have to be really careful if you are putting something up on wood that can be taken away off the street. Today you have to think about how this stuff is obviously very easy to take. So, yes, we do have more responsibilities, but we are also able to do more things then we were ever able to do before. We’ve got a little more money, so if we want to make bigger pieces:  something like the Temple, we at least have the resources to explore these much bigger ideas. We don’t ever want to lose the street side. It’s such an inspiration for the work. It’s just shifting a little bit the way we do public work and public projects. Deluxx Fluxx had the same feeling.  You catch people randomly walking by unexpected to it, and they’d come in and be totally confused and they left with something, and that’s how the stencils and the posters work, maybe not on such a comprehensive level. But it worked the same with the Temple. People would walk up to it totally confused.

You guys have always stayed away from explaining the “meanings” of your work. How important to you is it for  people to find their own meanings in your work and interact with your art in their own way?

Patrick Miller: There are so many narratives. You may have an association of one narrative with one image and it is tied to into something else, and you have to think what make a connection to that.

Patrick McNeil: Right. It gives the viewer those points of entry and then lets them explore and take it where they want. It’s a good thing for us to deliver them to the work, and then say “enjoy the ride.”  A lot of it is tied to memories for certain images and it reminds you of moments in life. It’s a good sharing of those things.

Patrick McNeil: This year was so crazy in a way that we hadn’t set out for at the end of last year.  We knew we were working on the Temple, but I still think we didn’t really think it was going to actually happen and materialize. Even our Arcade show came about super fast.

Patrick Miller: We’ve been talking about going back to canvas for a bit and messing with that for a bit. This is still an exciting process, though.

Patrick McNeil: We keep talking about heading out west. We haven’t been out there in a while, so I think it would be fun to do something out there.

Patrick Miller: We’ve been thinking about going to Detroit. Maybe Detroit…

Patrick McNeil: It’s been such a great year.  I think we’re looking forward to taking the holidays to relax a little bit.

Share on Tumblr