EYE Artist’s Rendering

Few will argue that the city of Chicago is a fantastic place to go for a vacation. The food is amazing, there are a million places to go and things to do, and even if the weather is crap – as it was on my recent Chicago vacation – there’s tons of stuff to do indoors. But if you are lucky enough to get the good weather, then you can spend a lot of time outdoors because Chicago has breathtaking architecture and outrageous, randomly scattered, publicly displayed works of art. The latest contribution to Chicago’s city scape is called EYE, a three-story tall eyeball sculpture conceived and created by local Chicago artist Tony Tasset, which was installed earlier this week in Chicago’s Pritzker Park.

According to a CNN report: Tasset chose an eye because it is a powerful symbol that has been used throughout history – by the Egyptians, for example. He designed a similar but much smaller sculpture for a park in St. Louis, Missouri. The steel reinforced fiberglass EYE has a blue iris because that is the color of Tasset’s eyes. The installation has a psychological edge to it and some people could find it creepy, Tasset acknowledged, calling it “surrealist-noir.”

If you’re planning a trip to Chicago, be sure to do it now because the EYE will only be on display until the end of October (hey, after that maybe they’ll bring it to New York)!

Watch a video of the EYE during its construction phase at this link.