Air Play presented by Orlando Health is set up in Senef Arts Plaza in front for the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts through October 30, 2022. I went to sketch with my advanced Urban Sketching student and we found that everything was deflated on Sunday afternoon. It was like a large lawn of sad deflated Santas and snowmen that people have on their front lawns around Christmas time. We decided to sketch these large eyes of Sauron in the corner of the lawn since they were the only things that remained inflated.
Between the eyes is a large green generator. As we sketched a guy came out with a cart that had 10 to 15 gallons of gas to power the generator. When it roared to life all the structured on the lawn slowly began to inflate. The large structures were covered with brown tarps and those tarps had to be rolled back much like you might see at a baseball game after it rains.
Penis shaped mushrooms sprouted up behind one of the eyes along with a large red ant. Bright red and yellow flowers covered a hillside which was probably a kid’s slide. Someone then rolled the eyes away to the opposite side of the lawn. It turns out you can roll these eyeballs around and play a distorted game of eyeball soccer. Also on the lawn was a large 15 foot tall heart, lungs and what looked like human intestines. It was a bright, Gulliver sized recreation of Normandy beach on D-Day.
A young teen girl and her boyfriend rode by on those scooters they have downtown. She circled back and wanted to see our sketched. She didn’t know how to use the scooter, and when she stepped off, it did a wheelie and flipped over onto the lawn. They rode by a second time to check on our progress. As we sketched the theaters let out and a huge crowd pressed past us. I masked up as they all walked by talking about the shows.
As of March 7, 2022, The Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts lifted for all indoor shows and events both public and private. I saw maybe 2 masks in the crowd of hundreds who walked by. Orlando is done with the pandemic but the pandemic is not done with Orlando. The Orlando Sentinel reported that there were 22,592 new coronavirus cases recorded over the past two weeks among Florida residents, bringing the cumulative total to 7,129,245. There were 522 more COVID-19 deaths, bringing Florida’s total to 81,661 dead. When the Pulse nightclub shooting happened, people rushed to give blood. Now people are happy to ignore s literally hundreds of people die every week from COVID in Florida. The death baseline has shifted.