Behold Our Pandemic Playground
Thomas J. Madden, Chairman and CEO, Transmedia Group
Welcome to art in plastics.
The Pandemic Playground is a surreal composition comprising a phantasmagoria of plastics my wife Rita and I collect each day off the public beach in front of our stately oceanfront condo, The Chalfonte.
Behold the plastic toys, buckets, shovels and rakes. Plastic seahorses, smiling starfish and pearly fish wearing underwater goggles. Then there are the plastic crabs, turtles and rubber dinosaur stalking fear into the faces of tiny creatures.
What? A plastic cone? So, I plop a golf ball in and it becomes vanilla ice cream.
See the assorted figurines and objects, all paraphernalia in plastics discarded and strewn about, desecrating our beloved beach, insulting our ecosystem, yet they’re raw material for art.
Looking at it now artistically assembled, the once ugly trash turns into The Pandemic Playground, an imaginative work of art in plastics.
Collecting it has helped us to stay sane during this prolonged pandemic, while paying our respects and artistic homage to our planet, to our besieged environment befouled and desecrated by billions of plastic bottles and caps, knives, forks and spoons.
Why do restaurant workers continue to automatically toss those packages of plastic utensils into curbside orders? Why do kids leave so many shovels in the sullied sand. After a day’s sandcastle building and hole digging, why can’t parents see to it that the plastics are collected off the beach?
And now making things worse we’re seeing heaps of discarded face masks washing up on shores worldwide. Oh, our poor planet!
One of the several works or art I drew from the playground, created and signed with my artist’s initials, TM, is a collection of different colored plastic shovels we collected from the beach. The work is titled unsurprisingly “Shovels.”
If a museum would like to exhibit it, I’ll gladly supply this original work of art.
