Pat McCarthy - Surfin Bird Odyssey

Surfin Bird Odyssey celebrates the landscapes of Long Island by air, sea, and land, as Pat McCarthy journeys east to Montauk alongside his family of racing pigeons in their motorized Cushman Tuk-tuk, with surf boards on the roof. They're bent on getting out on the water, feeling the breeze, maybe standing up, and taking flight. Homing Pigeons are born to fly, far and fast, and this family of birds is eager to have the pleasure of touring Long Island from above, all 120 miles back to Brooklyn.

The gallery will exhibit sculpture born of McCarthy's hyper sensitive approach to raising pigeons and maintaining their rooftop village. The new works are poetic assemblages combining ceramics, blacksmithing, wood carving, book binding, motorcycle engine repair, architecture, and of course ship-wrighting and surfing. The works reveal a method of making art as a constant navigation through nature, a search for the extremes in the every day, incessantly asking: don't you know about the bird?

BOO-HOORAY exhibits both at home in New York City as well as internationally. We also stage collaborative exhibitions with the Hayward Gallery and Rough Trade in London, Tsutaya Daikanyama, Hysteric Glamour, and United Arrows in Tokyo, Galleri Operatingplace in Stockholm, Colette in Paris, PopMontreal in Montreal, Mishka Los Angeles, Printed Matter at both MOCA/LA and PS1/NYC, and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, the New York Public Library, the Grolier Club, and Milk Gallery in New York.

Boo-Hooray exhibitions have included shows featuring Larry Clark, The Velvet Underground, Ray Johnson, Afrika Bambaataa, Jonas Mekas, Ed Sanders, Linder Sterling and Jon Savage, Spencer Sweeney, Houston Rap, private press vinyl, Wallace Berman, anarcho-punk group Crass, Jason Polan, Jack Smith, cult-filmmaker Ed Wood, and Situationist Times editor Jacqueline de Jong.

The exhibitions are drawn from cultural archives that Boo-Hooray excavates, organizes, and places in institutions such as Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Cornell University’s Division of Rare Manuscript Collections, Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library.