Quasi: Ronnie van Hout’s Surreal Hand-Faced Giant Watches Over the City

Perched on rooftops and peering down at the streets below, Quasi is a monumental itinerant sculpture by New Zealand-born, Melbourne-based artist Ronnie van Hout. The intriguing work takes the form of a colossal hand with a grim, human face, both modeled on the artist’s own features.

The sculpture’s name is a clever double entendre: a nod to Victor Hugo’s Quasimodo, the lonely outcast watching over Paris from the heights of Notre Dame, and to the Latin word quasi, meaning “almost” or “as if.” Like its name, Quasi embodies dualities. It’s a human form that’s “not quite human,” a body part that has taken on a life of its own.

Ronnie’s practice has long explored the uncanny and the existentially absurd and Quasi is another striking example of that exploration. Known for using casts and scans of his own body to create uncanny doppelgängers, the artist often interrogates identity, alienation and the gaze — turning viewers into the observed.

If you’d like to discover more of Ronnie van Hout’s fascinating work, be sure to follow him on Instagram.

Images: Ronnie van Hout, Dark Mofo, Mona, Darren Knight Gallery, Christchurch Art Gallery, City Gallery Wellington, Urban F.

More art on the grid via Dark Mofo