St. Louis expat Josh Faught is making name for himself with ebullient, jittery—and sometimes glittery—textile pieces.
Like a lot of 18-year-old kids, Faught booked it out of St. Louis as fast as his college acceptance letter could carry him. He got a bachelor’s degree at Oberlin College in art history and English; scored a “glorified internship” at revolutionary interiors magazine Nest
One piece might combine ancient, formal techniques like ikat weaving with hand-knitting (which he learned from his grandmother), as well as found items like greeting cards, glitter, self-help books, toilet paper, political pins, Xeroxed flyers, acrylic nails, potpourri, mirrors, and political buttons. Sometimes that ephemera is translated to textiles, like the giant PFLAG flyer that appears on the side of the piece Winter (Ann Rule), an aromatic cedar bookcase containing all of Faught’s works by that author (and a tube of his homemade lavender lip balm).
“[That flyer] was woven on an industrial jacquard loom,” Faught explains. “I did a residency at The Jacquard Center in Hendersonville, N.C. It’s basically this big textile mill that for a while, at least, allowed artists to come and spend a week there, and weave anything that could be digitized on these looms that are 60 inches wide by an indefinite amount of yards long, with the finest Egyptian cotton possible.”
The newsletter, for him, is emblematic of his own experience coming out as a teen in the late ’90s, when he’d drive from Creve Coeur to South City for PFLAG meetings, which at the time he found “so awkward and terrible.” Much of his work draws from his experiences growing up in suburban St. Louis, weaving together sweetness, anxiety, beauty, humor, and the political. (His own description is that it “dwells in the place of urgent ambivalence.”)
Faught, who now lives in San Francisco, has shown all over the country, including at the Seattle Art Museum, the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York, and the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, though never locally. That will be remedied this month with an exhibit of new work for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis’ Front Room titled “Snacks, Supports, and Something to Rally Around.”
“This work for St. Louis is going to get really weird,” Faught says, laughing, when asked about materials. The concept is time, and how we support each other through its passage. One piece uses patchworked disaster blankets and a Wicked Witch of the East leg (commandeered from a Halloween decoration), lashed together like a trellis and playing with the idea of “support.” The exhibit also includes two oversize crocheted clocks (one reading 9 a.m., the other reading 5 p.m.) and an enormous triptych with woven panels on the left and the right, based on the pictorial calendars you will see hanging in every suburban kitchen. The middle panel is an abstract fiber piece dyed with woad and indigo, two of the oldest dyes known to humankind; many cultures consider indigo supernatural.
“As you bring the cloth out of the vat and into the air, it changes colors from like this piss-yellow green to blue right before your eyes,” Faught says. “It’s magic. The more you dip the cloth, the deeper the blue gets. You can get it to almost a blue-black if you’re really patient. It’s really magical. It’s like no other dye. It is alchemical.”
And in this abstract tapestry, Faught has embedded rubber casts of various snack foods, like nachos, popcorn, and onion rings. But snacks have magic in them, too. “I always think about snack time as this very liminal space, this time where it always is not lunch, not dinner, not breakfast. It’s like somewhere between,” he says. “And I think a lot of the work I’m making is situated in between major events, or in this passage of time…which is definitely snack time.”
But Faught isn’t a mystic. His work is grounded in time, in the concrete, and in human relationships.
“My mom is a really avid junk food junkie,” Faught explains vis-à-vis the rubber snacks. “She would always have Hostess Sno Balls, nachos…they just have a lot of junk food in the house. And it’s almost like she has an apocalyptic pantry. It looks like the world’s going to end. It’s so endearing and wonderful, and at the same time it’s really intense. So the idea of incorporating snacks I always think about in terms of my mom, because she’s a real snack person.”
The exhibit opens July 10 at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (3750 Washington, 314-535-4660, camstl.org), with a reception that includes a lecture by the artist at 6:30 p.m. On July 14, Faught leads the workshop Sunday Studio: Indigo Dyeing at 1 p.m. The class is $5, or free for members; bring a natural-fiber item for “bluing.” The exhibit closes August 11.
