In April 2012, the Brooklyn-based artists FAILE produced a new site-specific project on Williamsburg’s North 7th Street called, 104 North 7th. The project, for which FAILE has tiled a complete building facade with hand-painted and sculpted ceramic tiles, draws on their own decade-long practice and a global history of abstraction. And while there are precedents for this sort of undertaking, this project is something new altogether—a meditation on the everyday forms of abstraction that have informed FAILE’s recent studio work. Evident, here, are the modular structures of FAILE’s wooden block paintings, the subtle weaving of salvaged material in American quilting, and the accumulations of bold tilework in Portuguese azulejos or Islamic architectural ornamentation, all of which FAILE took up on the streets and in the gallery during the past several years. Which is to say, 104 N. 7th, is a natural outgrowth of FAILE’s works on wood and canvas, but also a step forward—street art transmuted by the studio and redeployed on the artists’ home turf.
