The Eye Sculpture
On the ides of June, while squinting at a cluster of threatening clouds from his perch on a grassy construction site just outside of Sparta, WI. this small city, Chicago sculptor Tony Tasset is, to use his words, totally freaking out.
“You know those reality shows?” Tasset says, a slightly uneasy smile on his face. “This is that part when the team is up against their deadline, and it looks like they’re never going to finish on time.”
Tasset’s “team” is made up of a half-dozen fiberglass workers at Sparta’s Fast Corp. (Fiberglass Animals Shapes and Trademarks), who have been assigned to construct the artist’s largest piece to date: a giant eyeball aptly named Eye, which, upon completion, will stand three stories tall and stare east from the Loop’s Pritzker Park, at State and Van Buren streets. Tasset was commissioned for the job last fall by the Chicago Loop Alliance, and Fast Corp., with which he had collaborated on prior sculptures (including a 12-foot-high eyeball), took the engineering reins earlier this year.
Source: Chicago Tribune