Craig Calderwood with their painting Emotional Support, Hornet’s Nest in Fight or Flight: Crafting a Bay Area Life at the Museum of Craft and Design, San Francisco, CA, 2023. Image courtesy the Museum of Craft and Design.
We’re delighted to see work by Craig Calderwood included in Fight and Flight: Crafting a Bay Area Life, currently on view at the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco, CA.
The exhibition features twenty-three Bay Area artists who have remained in the area in spite of the crises of our time, such as the ramifications of Covid-19; gentrification; the high cost of living; and racist, xenophobic, and transphobic violence. Calderwood’s painting Emotional Support, Hornet’s Nest is based on their experience working at a grocery store during the pandemic and depicts a figure leaning on a utility cart. The face is composed of an intricate pattern of flowers, the blue pansies in place of their eyes are symbolic of nostalgia and compassion but also have been used as a slur for LGBTQIA+ individuals. According to Calderwood, “This piece is about the incongruous experience of being an essential worker while having a sense of self preservation during the past two years of Covid. Or the unwillingness to martyr myself for business, and to find essential comforts while stuck in the structure of business. The piece is a breakup text, a love letter, some fearful scribblings on a post-it. It’s a piece I made in retaliation to feeling sacrificial.”
The exhibition is on view through September 10, 2023.