Using everyday materials including graphite, ballpoint pen, and highlighter, McCarty creates mural-sized drawings related to issues ranging from sexual and social formation, gender and power, to parricide and infanticide.
Her early works were large text paintings featuring words such as "Slash" and "Snatch" in a highly stylized typeface, or single phrases such as "I may not go down in history but I may go down on your little sister," and "You're my slut bottom suck.
[8] Her works were exhibited across the US and Europe accompanied by a catalogue, Die Neoantigen (The Nineties) in 1994 at the Vienna Secession in Austria [9] McCarty started research for what was to become her most famous body of work, the “murder girls” series or “Poltergeist, Girls at Home,” [10] a series of 42 mural-sized portraits made with graphite pencil and ball-point pen.
She took great care to distinguish the work from sensationalist true crime tales by including a written addendum with each portrait, combining touching details of the girls' lives with descriptions of the murders they committed.
[citation needed] Due to the artist's challenging subject matter, it took a long time for her portraits to be absorbed by the art world.
For example, McCarty draws with a blue ballpoint pen, which is what high-school girls use for their homework or for “doodling on their notebooks,” and it is also the preferred tool for “primate fieldwork.” [12] Although McCarty finds the medium physically demanding (because the pressure required to keep the ink flowing when drawing on a wall may cause shoulder injuries), she continues to work with ballpoint pen and graphite, producing monumental works that speak to social and sexual inequality, the role of women, interspecies relationships, and trans biology.
[12][13] In 2003, McCarty received a Guggenheim Fellowship [14] to research a 3D immersive project, Bad Blood, which was an interactive sculpture based on the portrait of Marlene Olive from the artist's “murder girls” series.
As part of her Fellowship, McCarty traveled the world speaking with experts and leading workshops at Hyper Werk Institute for Postindustrial Design in Basel, Switzerland, and the ETH in Zurich.
This work culminated in a monumental 2013 drawing retrospective at the Royal Hibernian Academy of Dublin, Ireland, titled Hard Keepers.
(2006) pictures a young woman, perhaps a primatologist, twined, enmeshed, and eroticized with her favorite gorilla, while group 3 (Tanjung Putting, Borneo.
It looked like a coked up teenage girl decided to take the big pen drawings off her trapper keeper and magnifying them a thousand times.
[citation needed] McCarty's most recent works turn to plants to affirm ways not only to survive but also to thrive in toxic conditions.
[citation needed] Her drawings ruminate on masculinity, capitalism, whiteness, and their inherent toxicities, layering and merging unruly poisonous flowers with flesh and hair, using graphite and ballpoint pen.
To extend the project outside of the gallery walls, McCarty created a 45-foot diameter public garden of poisonous plants, with the support of UB Arts Collaboratory and Silo City.
[citation needed] The works in Can I Borrow Your Hole at Last Tango were produced during the COVID-19 pandemic at the time of the first major Black Lives Matter protests.
The works contain some of the artist's first small drawings and are installed on placards designed to highlight the power of taking to the streets to demand institutional change.