The contentious New York gallery debut of Josh Faught, a young artist who lives in Eugene, Ore., is a cause for hope, both despite and because of an abundance of rough edges and loose ends. Mr. Faught, who earned an M.F.A. from the Art Institute of Chicago, refuses to rule out much in his astutely self-aware, craft-conscious combinations of painting, relief, collage, assemblage, knitting, weaving, fiber art, appropriation and gay politics. Indigo — perhaps the most common natural dye — is frequently used not only on textiles, yarn and dried flowers, but also on stacks of books and to print images from gay weeklies. Sequins are almost equally abundant, and pinned-on political announcements are not uncommon: “Sorry Girls, I’m Gay.”

Ikat, the ancient dye-while-you-weave technique, is employed in a work called “How to Beat the High Cost of Living,” except that the dye in question is purple nail polish. Red nail polish is splattered all over a largish rectangle of crocheted hemp. (Think small potholders; note the changes in orientation.) This time-consuming process would probably have given Jackson Pollock fits. In “House Cleaning” a similar expanse of hemp is sprayed gold, and not-so-vaguely-sexual knitted protrusions (a frequent motif) are edged in gold sequins. The works’ stretchers are sometimes latticelike grids, discreetly sheathed in knitting, and result in scalloped edges.

At the center of Mr. Faught’s magpie art is a resolute determination: All will be revealed. In the future it might be revealed with greater visual clarity and punch and maybe sharper contrasts. But this show is an exhilarating beginning.––Roberta Smith

In "While the Light Lasts," Josh Faught's New York solo debut, the artist mines textile's homespun origins, employing traditional craft techniques like crochet, loom weaving and ikat, and working with raw fibers. Referencing the queer and feminist deployment of traditionally domestic crafts during the 70's and after, Faught's sculpture undercuts the memory of revelatory political agency with a meditation on contemporary anxiety. 

The works are displayed on freestanding armatures or else hung from four-by-six-foot linen canvases, such that the textiles resemble garments draped over mannequins. Both armature and frame support create the effect of frontality, even as their technique and orientation nudges them toward sculpture. The afghan-like Signs of Life (all works, 2009) wraps around its support to reveal a crocheted brown backside, alluding to the unseen back of the stretched canvas.

Asymmetrically but methodically composed, Faught's textiles appear to have accrued in a piecemeal fashion. To the surface he's appended labels, nail polish and sequins, all materials culled from the purview of the amateur crafter. Attached to Claiming What's Yours, a flyer presumably stripped from some coffee shop bulletin board asks, "Overwhelmed?" and offers tear-off contact numbers for assistance. A strip of ribbons screen-printed with the repeated phrase "MY BAG-MY BAG..." etc, presents a competing voice vying for the piece's (and the viewer's) attention. If one allows the claim which interprets these works as "characters," their signage might point to the multiple agendas a single character juggles. Both Claiming What's Yours and Claiming What's Not Yours are presented on stretcher bars, and both employ these iterative ribbons. In Claiming What's Not Yours a series of ribbons bearing the phrase "NOT YOUR BAG—NOT YOUR BAG ..." is cleverly ensconced between crocheted swatches, which graft onto each other such that the vertical strip is stitched into an awkward bowed curve, its text muffled in the now primarily graphic impression the fabric affords. The patchwork-like House Plant's upbeat gay pride-themed buttons proclaim a nostalgic "anything goes" attitude, but these works reveal deeper-seated worries over money, the future, and keeping things together.

Despite the works' allusions to bodily form, Faught's work does not effectively reference the body as massed presence, as, say, Robert Morris's plywood forms had before them. Nor does Faught perform presence literally, by resemblance, as do the costume-sculptures of artist Nick Cave.

The humanity of these structures is in the sublimated desires articulated by the evident manipulation of fiber, which finds its foil in the slack decorativeness and simplistic assertions of queer pride on the appliqué and buttons. This contrast between the exuberantly performed surface and the ambulatory, sprawling labor of the stitchwork aptly best captures the unresolved tensions of the contemporary mind.––Catherine Kron

The young West Coast artist both sends up and pays homage to radical crafts. A scruffy tapestry titled "House Plant" is studded with bulbous spores and campy plastic pins with slogans like "Sorry Girls, I'm Gay." Another piece involves a big denim bow, a laminated flyer for housecleaning services, and a button that reads, 'Sorry I missed church. I was practicing witchcraft and becoming a lesbian." Faught's live-and-let-macramé attitude may best be represented here by a pair of tapestries whose embroidered ribbons read "My Bag" and "Not Your Bag."

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...   - Jen Graves