In Art News

Across from the elevators at Seattle Art Museum are three lone
windows looking out onto a darkening night. On the rightmost
windowsill, one fighting burst of light comes from a pink candle on an
old-fashioned chamberstick. Standing next to the window is a
sad-looking rolled-up window tied with a ribbon that reads “Not Your
Bag.” (Me?)

The windows are a series of afghans made of crocheted yarn dipped in
indigo dye, and strings stream down their faces like rain. They are
taken from patterns, but this is not what the patternmakers intended.
The designs have been scaled up and the finished products are wrapped
awkwardly around garden trellises, their sides unevenly scalloped from
the poking edges of the wood. They’re the size of paintings, but where
painted canvases would be stapled neatly to stretchers, these wear
fat scars of imperfect hand stitching. This work of art is
called Endless Night (2008), and it’s warm and lonely and
expectant, not just offering the chance at standing in front of a dark
window to wait for something to happen, but capturing just how you feel
when you remember yourself there. What could have occurred? The
nostalgic past might yet turn out differently.

The artist is Josh Faught. He studied art at the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago, since 2007 has taught art at the University of
Oregon in Eugene, and is this year’s winner of Seattle Art Museum’s
Betty Bowen Award for an outstanding Northwest artist, which comes with
a cash prize of $15,000 and a yearlong display. Endless Night is
what’s displayed at the museum, and it pulls me in until I’m
falling, making me want to see much more of Faught’s work.

“It’s not like I don’t need to protest because I make this work,” he
says in a phone interview. We’re talking about politics. About the way
his work is urgently political, how it analogizes being gay in a
straight world and working with fabric in the art world. How it deals
with issues of sagginess and solidity in sculpture. Signs of
nervous hands versus signs of mastery in craft. Most artists outsource
labor to hire somebody skilled; Faught uses shaky assistants.

He grew up in a suburb of Saint Louis, a placid place haunted by
suburban-style threats (toxic chemicals! Sex predators!), and there’s a
tender acknowledgment of fear and disruption in what he makes.
Triage (2009) is a patchwork tapestry painted with nail polish,
wearing political pins and a row of self-help books in sewn pockets.
You Can’t Live Scared (2007) is a dark, webby weaving hung next
to a Super 8 film of the artist trying to read an explicit personals ad
while climbing, naked, into the bathtub.

I wish those were here; I’m all eyes. I’m fantasizing about a
Northwest queerness show already, with Faught, Jeffry Mitchell, Matthew
Offenbacher, Eli Hansen…