Critical Forum is hosting the Love at the Glove art exhibition on Friday, Feb 13 in the Glove Factory from 6 to 9 p.m. Food will be provided at the event as well as live music performed by Stay Here and Katt Holliday. Admission to the event is $5 per person.

Love at the Glove is an annual art show held around Valentine’s Day at the Surplus Gallery, an exhibition space in the Glove Factory, an off-campus SIU art studio at 438 S Washington St., across from the Carbondale Police Department. The event is hosted by Critical Forum, or C4, a university RSO which describes itself as a “Sculpture guild,” consisting of students mainly from SIU art and design programs. Critical Forum also hosts the annual fall Iron Pour, where participants are invited to create scratch block molds to be cast during the event. 

Prospective SIU students, staff or community members may also submit pieces for the event from 5 to 8 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday at the Surplus Gallery. C4 is accepting submissions for two- and three-dimensional art, as well as performance and installation art. While Love at the Glove is a celebration of Valentine’s Day and has a history of romantic and erotic art, submissions are not required to relate to a theme. Participants will be responsible for the installation and deinstallation of their submissions. The cost of submission is $5, but covers the cost of admission as well. 

SIU student Dustin Kinney, a junior studying studio arts, has participated in the exhibition for the last two years.

“The last two years, it’s been very enjoyable,” Kinney said. “It’s just kind of good exposure, at least for local artists and students in the art department. It’s really a great way of just getting your stuff out there and getting people to see it.”

One participant of this year’s exhibition is second-year graduate Brenden Deasy, pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture. Deasy has submitted a number of sculptures for his second year in a row participating in Love at the Glove. 

“It’s just a great way to get like all the community members out here,” Deasy said. “It’s students, faculty, old artists that graduated in the ‘70s and they’re still hanging around and love the local area. It’s so nice to have those conversations and meet the people that have been involved since the beginning.”

Deasy began working with clay during COVID-19 quarantine and has been actively working in sculpture for five years. 

“I took ceramics classes in high school and my dad was a painter when I was growing up,” Deasy said. “He went to school for painting and photography. So it was always kind of accessible to be expressing and doing art-related things, and then I think as I kind of got more into it in high school, I was like, ‘this is fun and applicable.’”

Two of Deasy’s installations will be featured next week at the DownEast National Indoor Sculpture Show in Greenville, North Carolina: “Someone will be with you shortly,” a pink, waxy silicon cast of a service bell contained in a plexiglass box, and “Turn on your listening ears and press mine,” a plush elephant on a tall, wire tricycle. 

“All of them are constituted under this same body of work of the idea of overconsumption and kind of human involvement in that process,” Deasy said. “And so thinking about the idea of consumption and our overbearing world, well, how can we kind of add a little bit of fun to it,  a little bit of comfort. So kind of taking the idea of like stuffed animals and that physical comfort as a child and kind of that innocence of a nonexistent friend, in a way, and kind of reiterating that in an adult world  with things that we’re more used to seeing.”

Staff reporter Morrigan Carey can be reached at [email protected]. To stay up to date with all your southern Illinois news, follow the Daily Egyptian on Facebook and Twitter.

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