Test Pattern series sets up a generic template as a poetic prompt to consider how behavioural responses to color and form stimulate an abstract sense of contemporary being.
The ostensible template here refers to the color calibration test of the machinic eye (the camera's eye) in a common tool for this purpose, the test pattern. This is not a strictly conceptual usage however, but more of a purposeful play with instrumental meaning and its possible liberation in poetic trance.
Like the Survey and Decal series, the Test Pattern series intend to refer to technological and social conditioning, or the abstraction of contemporary experience, and also the potential for transcending that conditioning by grasping it in the physical and perhaps less-determined form of paintings on wood panel.
Tom McGlynn is an American abstract artist whose oeuvre explores interactive color and proportion in tension with their potential semiotic meaning. He is also an independent curator and a writer, contributing regularly to The Brooklyn Rail. Furthermore, the artist is the founding director of Beautiful Fields, an organization dedicated to socially-engaged curatorial projects. He is currently teaching at the Parsons New School of Design in New York City.
He lives and works in the NYC area.