All Photos By Gail

FAILE: Savage/Sacred Young Minds is a crazy fun exhibit that you should make an effort to see before it closes in just under a month. For those who are unfamiliar, FAILE is a Brooklyn-based collaboration between artists Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller. Through their bold and provocative artworks, they raise questions about our relationship to consumer culture, religious traditions, and the urban environment, by blurring the boundaries between fine art, street art, and popular culture. This exhibit covers a broad scope of Faile’s impressive resume.

Fantasy Island

The works on view include multimedia installations, large-scale paintings, and sculptures that appropriate imagery from a wide variety of sources, including American quilts, folk and Native American art, religious architecture, pulp magazines, comic books, sci-fi movie posters, adult entertainment advertisements, and storefront typography.

The duo’s colorful and visually engaging paintings are created in the style of comic book/graphic novel illustrations and are extremely dense with images that tell a hundred stories.

The exhibition includes The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade, an interactive environment created in collaboration with Brooklyn artist Bäst that includes video games, pinball machines, and foosball tables that are simultaneously sculptures and functioning games.

The installation is a nostalgic nod to video arcades and punk rock and graffiti culture. Here are few of the custom-designed games you can play!

Everyone really seemed to enjoy playing the games!

All games are free to play, but you can buy a souvenir token imprinted with the name of the exhibit for just $1.00. What a bargain!

The arcade theme continues in a black-lit anterior room where you can find Day-Glo Foosball tables and people taking assloads of selfies! Check this shit out!

This what the floor looks like. Geoffrey laid down on it and had me take photos of him.

Foosball Table game that you can play!

The walls are plastered with images from FAILE’s many projects.

It is like being on Acid.

Also on view is FAILE’s Temple, a life-size structure reminiscent of a ruined religious temple. Made of iron, ceramic reliefs, and painted ceramics, and incorporating prayer wheels and popular-culture imagery, Temple imagines a reaction against commercial development and consumer greed.

The exterior of the Temple reminded me very much of a subway station entrance, albeit much cleaner!

Here’s what it looks like inside!

FAILE’s take on the Prayer Wheels found in Buddhism and other spiritual followings.

As you can see, there is a lot to take in at this exhibit and you could easily go twice and notice different aspects of the artworks on each visit.

FAILE: Savage/Sacred Young Minds will be on Exhibit Through October 4th, 2015 in the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Gallery, 5th Floor, at the Brooklyn Museum.