Josh Faught at The Neptune Society Columbarium, San Francisco

“CANCER SUCKS!” reads a button perched beside San Francisco Giants memorabilia, family photographs, and various other tchotchkes. This niche is one of thousands of memorials, each containing cremated human remains, on the second floor of the Neptune Society Columbarium in San Francisco. In the building’s atrium, directly opposite the niche, hangs a 20 foot dyed fabric installation by the artist Josh Faught. A button on Faught’s work reads, “Ever see a rainbow smile?”

The installation was commissioned in conjunction with SFMOMA’s SECA Awards, distributed biennially to the upper crust of “emerged” Bay Area artists. In any other year Faught would have installed in the museum proper. To accommodate the museum’s ongoing remodel, however, all of this year’s exhibitions were moved to offsite venues. Faught takes full advantage of the relocation, using the context and space of the Columbarium to create one of the more memorable and poignant exhibitions in San Francisco this year.

In addition to various sewn-on buttons, Faught’s fabrics are adorned with novelty pretzels, nachos and cookies. VHS tapes and awful greeting cards poke out of pockets sewn directly onto the works. Faught has fastened similarly amusing or queer-coded objects to his works for a while, but in this context they mimic the craft-store busyness of many of the Columbarium memorials. The atrium installation, as well as two smaller works on the second and third floors, might as well be permanent, matching the Neoclassical structure’s simultaneous grandeur and frump, plastic orchid for rubber onion ring.

There are obvious dichotomies here between lowbrow pop culture and handmade craft, as well as those between gender and labor. But in a city which has has exhibited its share of ironic fabric art (Ben Venom’s heavy metal quilts and Erin Riley’s tapestries of amateur porn scenes come to mind), Faught’s works stand out as earnest, if jokey. The hand-woven, hand-dyed installations seem less about obvious material connotations and more about an emotive resonance. Walking through the floors within the Columbarium, there is a palpable reminder of not just the HIV/AIDs epidemic which hit the city decades ago, but the devastation it had on the LGBT community.

An image of a simplistic, cartoonish clock, as if lifted from an Atari game or Guston painting, is woven into all three of Faught’s fabric installations. As you naturally work your way up the second and third floors of the building, the clock hands advance in each successive installation. Is this detail morbid, charming, or both? It is the vacillations between these sentiments, the inability to totally pin down Faught’s work, which is exactly why they do resonate.

Josh Faught, ”BE BOLD For What You Stand For, BE CAREFUL For What You Fall For,” works commissioned by SFMOMA for The Neptune Society Columbarium, San Francisco. Through 17 November, 2013.

Josh Faught at the Neptune Society Columbarium

Josh Faught, Untitled (installation view), 2013; site-specific installation, hand-dyed and hand-woven textile. BE BOLD For What You Stand For, BE CAREFUL For What You Fall For, The Neptune Society Columbarium, San Francisco. Commissioned by SFMOMA, courtesy the artist and Lisa Cooley, New York. © Josh Faught, photo by Ian Reeves.