Win McCarthy

"Everywhere glass, steel.

Everywhere pigeon, rat, roach.

What is same here, same everywhere."

To see all is, perhaps, to see nothing... and thus, a vantage from the afterlife...

Calling to mind Luigi Russolo’s Dynamism of an Automobile, and the Futurist Manifesto’s delirious promise of power through technological singularity, the works in Kingdom Come capture instead a futurist melancholia – the onslaught of the everyday rendered as an immersive VR. The tableaus included – a crosswalk, a delivery van, a lingerie advertisement, an apartment staircase – were constructed using an Iphone’s panorama feature. To produce this sense of a wider view, the effect requires fragmentation and reassembly. Images are broken, time stretched and compressed. The panorama has grandiose aspirations: to capture all. But an unsettling distortion emerges at the seams. A gut feeling that totality can’t be simply a grand sum of so many views.

New York City is a fitting subject then, a throbbing Leviathan of individual subjects, each with a vantage, each with a wildly disproportionate claim to personal space, property, net worth, self-regard or the opposite, all tangible intangibles, surrounded then by the material fact of the city – bricks, panes of glass, curbs, manhole covers, screws.

"They say, he says, all rise must fall,

all born must die. All this flatten to an inch,

made of screws anyway, made of pieces,

everywhere then

return to pieces. Sorry!"

A certain passivity is required, as most modern conveniences offer an inertia, an incapacity. One’s sense of being a subject of history is ostensibly verified by an output of about 20,000 photographs a year, mysterious HEIC files in many cases, an amount of material that would require superhuman processing power to collate and composite into a nearly comprehensible life. Try to locate yourself then among the mob of image producing subjects: dogs marking the curb with piss, moving on, pissing again. Subjectivity reaches its saturation point. One yearns then for the divine photographer, an omniscient view, satisfying all need to record, a great ledger, mmm, yes, it’s been called the grace of god!

"Don’t say everywhere steel.

Everywhere glass.

You are here, around.

Everyone. First breath, last breath. Everywhere. Dark, then light, then dark. Same second, same pulsing second.

Same hour.

Everyone idiot. Beautiful, beaming idiot. Stand. Sit.

Always return.

Always rent free from then.

Always, occurring. Until never.

Never was. Never once. Not at all."

Win McCarthy (b. 1986, New York) lives and works in New York. Selected solo exhibitions include KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2023); Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam (2022, 2018); Galerie Neu, Berlin (2021); Atlantis, Marseille (2019); Svetlana, New York (2019); Silberkuppe, Berlin (2017); Off Vendome, New York (2015). Selected group exhibitions have been held at Francis Irv, New York (2024); Fondazione Morra Greco, Naples (2023); Emalin, London (2023); Meredith Rosen Gallery, New York (2022); Overduin & Co., Los Angeles (2022); Swiss Institute, New York (2022); Drawing Center, New York (2020) Kunsthal, Rotterdam, NL (2019); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016); Sculpture Center, New York (2014); White Flag Projects, St. Louis (2013).