All Photos By Gail
In last week’s post about the Ocean Shoe, I promised to give equal time to the sculptural work that replaced it: this hyper-realistic Eyeball, from the same artist, who is known as Billy Barnacles. I hope you can appreciate my attempted cleverness in waiting patiently to get the eyeball to align with the head of the cyclist in the background. You’re welcome.
Photo By Gail
I passed by this enigmatic mural, located on the north side of 2nd Street, just west of First Avenue, (right next to Julie’s Vintage) while on the way to meet Geoffrey for lunch. Part Eagle, part, Eyeball and part Fish, this work of street art really has everything! The artist’s signature is visible in the lower, right corner of the above image, but I am unable to decipher it or find him or her via a search for “Jonac” — which is what the signature appears to say. Any clues on the artist’s identity, please leave it in the comments – thanks!
Note: The artist has been correctly identified as Lonac in the comments below, many thanks!!
Photo By Gail
Le Faux Miroir (1928) presents an enormous lash-less eye with a luminous cloud-swept blue sky filling the iris, and an opaque, dead-black disc for a pupil. The allusive title, provided by Belgian surrealist writer Paul Nougé, seems to insinuate limits to the authority of optical vision: a mirror provides a mechanical reflection, but the eye is selective and subjective. Magritte’s single eye functions on multiple enigmatic levels: the viewer both looks through it, as through a window, and is looked at by it, thus seeing and being seen simultaneously. The Surrealist photographer Man Ray, who owned the work from 1933 to 1936, recognized this compelling duality when he memorably described Le Faux Miroir as a painting that “sees as much as it itself is seen.”
Photographed in the Museum of Modern Art n NYC.
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.