This work is part of an ongoing series started in 2012 and titled Survey.
McGlynn is interested in how a minimally-determined presentation of form can critique the residual meaning of the mediated imagery of popular culture, including corporate logos and perhaps more common signage.
"Survey" obliquely refers to a play on behavioral testing but also how contemporary images "scan". The title meant more in a connotative sense than any strict conceptual denotation.
The emphasis in McGlynn's work is not so much the continuity of a heritage of "pure" abstraction as much as it is an investigation into how societal abstractions can become assimilated as a "second nature" in memory and in poetic displacement.
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.