POST NO BILLS & FAILE

Los Angeles really is establishing itself as an arts hub. It seems lately, whenever you turn a corner, an exhibition, festival or launch is there to bowl you over with pleasure and surprise. Street art is popping up all over the city, artists are flocking, people are creating. It’s an exciting time to be in Los Angeles! How appropriate then that the hugely anticipated POST NO BILLS print shop in Venice launched this week with a ten-year retrospective from the iconic Brooklyn-based collaborative FAILE.

POST NO BILLS and FAILE, together, are a collaboration made in heaven. The term ‘post no bills’ refers to a stencil used on city barriers, construction sites and clean walls in order to keep them clear of graffiti and street-art. It comes as no surprise that this practice generally generates the complete opposite effect, with people creating, posting and painting everything and anything on the ‘blank canvas’ that is the wall. POST NO BILLS believe: breaking the rules inspires more ingenuity than following them. So the new POST NO BILLS shop was created as an inventive space focusing on hand-made limited edition multiples. POST NO BILLS is the one-stop-shop for collectors to find work from groundbreaking artists from around the world.

FAILE consists of the artistic dynamic duo, Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller. The two artists have attained global recognition for their street art, their use of fragmented pop-culture imagery and their exploration of collage. Their acclaimed work has been recognised internationally for the last 10 years, creating paintings and prints as well as contributing to city walls around the world. McNeil and Miller met growing up in Arizona but it wasn’t until years later that the two began to collaborate artistically. Beginning by creating prolific and innovative street-art in downtown New York, FAILE are particularly famous for their wall murals, using the street as a canvas.

FAILE’s paintings and prints attempt to recreate the appearance of the plastered,
torn and weathered posters seen on street walls. Creating imagery that is both iconic and political, FAILE produces original work that critiques popular culture and consumerist culture with passive messages cloaked in ambivalence. Inspired by urban artists such as Shepard Fairey, BAST and WK Interact, FAILE’s style can be associated with artists whose work is both idiosyncratic and political.

The FAILE and POST NO BILLS exhibition runs from June 24 – July 24, 2011. This exciting collaboration brings Brooklyn’s finest art duo together with LA’s newest treat! Not to be missed.

POST NO BILLS
1103 Abbot Kinney Blvd.
Venice Beach, CA 90291
310.399.2928
Tuesday – Sunday: 11am – 7pm
Monday: By Appointment Only.