When: May 17 through July 31, 2022
College Center, Old Book Store, Main Building

Gonkar Gyatso is a Tibetan born, British artist best known for mixing Buddhist iconography with pop imagery to investigate the complexities of identity that shape our times. This site-specific installation is on view in the Old Book Store in College Center and presents 40 of Gyatso’s “daily doodles” which he began in the summer of 2018. The drawings are packed with colorful renderings of people engaging in everyday activities while wearing masks, surrounded by a backdrop of COVID-related news and happenings, current events, evidence of government authority, and the artist’s humorous observations of the world around him. Seen together, the doodles reflect both the absurdity and the normalcy of urban life during a global pandemic. In China, where the artist has spent much of the last two years, a one-meter distance between people was strictly enforced. Gyatso has arranged 46 plastic stools that are commonly found in public spaces in China, into two separate groupings that recreate the one-meter rule.  Gyatso’s cryptic title for the work, 1m x 1m ≠ ∞, is a comment on how such physical restrictions have affected our ability to imagine a world of infinite possibilities.