Win McCarthy on Anxiety, Identity, and the Paradox of Artistic Practice

Brooklyn-based artist Win McCarthy maintains a studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn, a warehouse space he secured through childhood baseball connections. His 2019 exhibition 'Apartment Life' at Svetlana in New York's Chinatown featured domestic items like linens, a mirror, and a refrigerator stocked with rice cakes, butter, and Coke, all coated in grime to depict urban living without sentiment. McCarthy's work explores anxiety through diverse media including photography, text, architectural schematics, and sculptures featuring molds of his head and feet, stuffed dummies, and baby doll heads in shoeboxes. He describes his practice as navigating a mind-body problem, with the body often treated as a container for an overburdened mind. McCarthy, who avoids social media and gave his first published interview here, views art as not inherently 'net-positive' but something that can be 'good, despite everything.' He briefly quit his job for a show at Off Vendome, earned $14,000, then returned to flexible work, finding that being a 'professional artist' led to unproductive guilt. Influences include Rosemarie Trockel and Lutz Bacher's book 'Shit for Brains,' which he admires for its raw immediacy. McCarthy writes poetically on his work, citing Paul Violi's poem 'Index' as a college favorite, and engages with art anecdotally, such as through a Walter Benjamin biography. His current studio contains baby dolls wearing suits and ties, reflecting ongoing themes of identity and confinement.