Josh Faught “Christmas Creep”

Lisa Cooley Fine Art

poster for Josh Faught “Christmas Creep”

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Lisa Cooley presents Christmas Creep, Josh Faught’s third solo show with the gallery. An artist who has long been interested in our culture’s ability to communicate authentic feelings of joy, sorrow and regret through generic slogans and greeting card clichés, Josh Faught is an expert at forging specific sentiments out of glib generalizations. In both content and form, his woven, knitted and crocheted sculptures and installations frequently address issues of psychological attachment, desire, personal identity and community. Putting pressure on the etymological connection between “text” and “textile,” Faught’s works represent an attempt to express through fabric those things that cannot be conveyed through language. To Faught, textiles are a means of inquiry and expression, a medium chosen for its ablity to occupy a space that connects the twin poles of desire and ambivalence, making and unmaking, calamity and triumph.

Ever attuned to fads and fashion forecasts, Faught is acutely aware that the Christmas season seems to get earlier and earlier with each passing year. Hoping to prolong that rush of yuletide spending that comes with the seasonal introduction of holiday jingles in our ears and pumpkin spice lattes on our tongues, the commercial sector has unofficially implemented a marketing strategy colloquially referred to as “Christmas Creep.” As a result, Christmas decorations have come to cohabit with rubber masks and plastic jack–o’–lanterns on department store shelves. Inflatable candy canes share space with Styrofoam tombstones on suburban lawns. This idea—that highly delineated seasonal customs might come to meld into each other, to overlap and blend into grotesque hybrids—is one of the primary organizing principles in Faught’s Christmas Creep. As a result of the cultural and material synthesis of Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas, this time of year we find ourselves in liminal state where seasonal transitions are blurred and temporality becomes irrelevant. Christmas Creep is a place where wanting and dread coexist; where fear and fun are one in the same.

Many of the active themes in Christmas Creep evolved from Faught’s recent site-specific installation at the Neptune Society Columbarium of San Francisco, a nondenominational internment site that has come to serve as the final resting place for many of those members of the local gay community who lost their lives as a result of the AIDS epidemic. Over time, the site has become a de facto archive of queer history in the Bay area, a monument that is as much about the present as it is the past. At the Columbarium, Faught became fascinated with the way that votive objects left by loved ones have became “a very queer archive” in their own right, a living history situated in a place devoted to death. Taken as a whole, Faught’s work functions in much the same way. Ideas of history, time and sentiment are woven into the material structure of his textiles, which themselves become the ground for curated collections of objects like novelty buttons, fake food, and greeting cards. Faught’s sculptures and installations form their own kind of queer archive, but one that is necessarily expansive, and diffused throughout space and time.

In Christmas Creep, Faught has challenged himself with the task of creating a complete archive within the context of a single exhibition. Each sculpture in the exhibition is titled after a specific individual or group of individuals, all of whom have been romantically attached to the artist in the past. To Faught, this process of naming was a direct response to his own ambivalence around the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, Cleve Jones’ now 50–something–ton repository of the names of those who have been lost to the disease. However, in contrast to the uncomplicated memorializing of NAMES Project, the works in Christmas Creep are not intended as portraits of the artist’s ex–boyfriends and one–night–stands, nor are they an attempt to address the nature of his relationships with them. Rather, the works are meant to serve as an abstract conjuring of memory and desire. As Jacques Derrida described them, names are “at once singular and singularly untranslatable,” they are both specific and specifically general. All of the names that appear in the show—Andrew, Edward, Greg, Benjamin, Steve, Bill, Jim, Max—are tied to a particular referent, but the specificity of that reference evaporates when its context is altered. That context, in Christmas Creep, is left intentionally open to contingencies and gestures of undoing. Faught’s textiles are all hand–dyed, and most are stitched or woven by the artist’s own “inexpert hands.” The conspicuous imperfections that result—the broken patterns and jarring fluctuations in hue, the frayed edges and slipshod fringes—are part and parcel to the works’ concept and content. The stray threads that dangle from their surfaces threaten to pull them apart. The simulated “spills” that adorn the space on top or in front of Faught’s sculptures add an additional level of disapointment. The works in Christmas Creep muddle distinctions between of the specific and general, indifference and longing, the past and present.

Josh Faught lives and works in San Francisco, California. Recent solo museum exhibitions include a site–specific installation at the Neptune Society Columbarium as part of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art SECA Art Award Exhibition; the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Missouri (both 2013); and the Seattle Art Museum in conjunction with his Betty Bowen Award (2009). Solo exhibitions also include Kendall Koppe Gallery, Glasgow (2014), Lisa Cooley, New York (2012), and Western Bridge, Seattle (2010). He has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including at the Emily Foundation for the Arts, New York, Grazer Kunstverein, Austria, Oakville Galleries, Ontario (both 2013), University Art Museum, Albany, New York (2012), and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York (2011). Currently his work is in the group exhibition, Fiber: Sculpture 1960- Present at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, which will travel to the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, and the Des Moines Art Center, Iowa; and Rites of Spring, at the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston in 2014. This year, he participated as a resident artist at Sarah Elson’s Launch Pad in London. He is an Associate Professor at the California College of Arts in Oakland and San Francisco. His work is included in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art as well as the Rubell Family Collection. Faught is the recipient of the 2009 Seattle Art Museum Betty Bowen Award, the 2011 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant and the 2012 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art (SECA) Award.

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Schedule

from October 26, 2014 to December 21, 2014

Opening Reception on 2014-10-26 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Josh Faught

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