“Eye” by Tony Tasset (courtesy Headington Companies)

Dallas is now under the unblinking gaze of a work of mind-bending horror. Or rather, a 30-foot-tall fiberglass-based eyeball that has rolled into the Texas city this week to give a little surrealist action to the downtown cityscape.

Created by artist Tony Tasset, “Eye” as it is called, is installed outside the Joule Hotel, part of an ongoing collaboration with the nearby Nasher Sculpture Center. The mammoth eye was acquired by Headington Companies which owns the hotel, and regularly acquires contemporary art from the likes of Ellsworth Kelly, Richard Phillips, Robin Rhode, and Tony Cragg. Yet nothing by another artist has quite the same visceral impact as staring Tasset’s eye in the eye. It was in fact modeled on the artist’s own peepers, if that makes it more or less creepy.

If you’re unfamiliar with Tasset’s work, this isn’t his first trip down unsettling alley. His “Capuchine Chandelier” is a skeletal tribute to the mummies of the Capuchin Monastery, and he also created a depressed Paul Bunyan slumped in a field, as well as some eternal snowmen. To be fair, he also brought this joyful rainbow to Culver City, California.

“Eye” was last seen, or seeing, in Chicago’s Pritzker Park in 2010. Here’s a shot of its stare down with the Windy City:

“Eye” in Chicago (photograph by John Lodder)

For an on-the-ground report of this anatomical art’s arrival in Dallas, we turn to the Instagram of a connoisseur of freaky giant eyes, Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips, who stopped by while it was being installed:

(via Wayne Coyne’s Instagram)

You have through September to check out “Eye,” just don’t get paranoid if you feel like you’re being watched. You most definitely are.