This year marked the 25th annual Love at the Glove, an art show put on by Critical Forum, an SIU sculpture RSO, in the Surplus Gallery at the Glove Factory in Carbondale, Illinois.
Over the years, Love at the Glove has changed a lot. Each year it’s a little different, depending on what art people bring, who shows up or what performers are there.
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This year, the exhibition featured artwork from a variety of SIU student and community artists, including many returning artists.
This year, local band Ultra Sex performed at the event with a punk-rock style.
Adding a taste of risque to the show, James Ferraro, a returning community artist and SIU professor of physiology, displayed photographs that featured the human form.
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“I just love the human form,” Ferraro said. In his artwork, he said that he is often looking for graphic elements, contrast such as between cleanliness and dirtiness, tension, rigor and control for the artist and escapism for the model.
Suggestive artwork like this has been part of Love at the Glove since its conception.
“The student organization that I helped start invented this show as a way to celebrate Valentine’s Day,” SIU alumnus and Carterville native Bradley Bullock said. Bullock was one of the founders of Love at the Glove.
Because of the circumstances, he said that it was unlike a typical gallery space. Bullock said that when Love at the Glove was started, the space in the Surplus Gallery was storage for the university. “We actually moved everything over and hung a tarp up and just kind of threw it together in there.”
“It was very, you know, cutting edge,” Bullock said. “We were doing it in a warehouse, and so it’s definitely grown and become a lot more I think proper, for lack of better term.”
According to Bullock, Love at the Glove was started by the club League of Art and Design, which no longer exists. Now, the RSO Critical Forum puts on the event.
Bullock is still involved with the event today, and his daughter Isabella Bullock displayed a few of her pieces in the art show on Friday. Both he and his daughter came to the art show as well.
“It’s my third time submitting. I took a couple years off, but I’m back now,” Isabella Bullock said. For Love at the Glove, she created collages, which she said she has been into making by incorporating several mediums such as acrylic, paint markers and colored pencils.
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