At NADA New York 2023, Entrance presented a broad survey of recent sculpture and zine work by Pat McCarthy.

Ceramic assemblages express McCarthy’s experiences of raising animals, constructing architecture, selling food, and farming. Idiosyncratic and poetically handmade, McCarthy’s bricolage sculptures reveal an environmental study of ritual, architectural systems, and the fostering of life.

The artist has transformed several of his fanzines into wall-hanging “quilts” by meticulously hand-stitching entire volumes together. These pieces combine the folk traditions of quilting and zine-making to create a painterly narration of a book.

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Pat McCarthy, born 1987, lives and works in Brooklyn and Andes, New York.

Pat McCarthy works primarily in sculpture, zines, and video, as well as staging social happenings, many of which include street food. McCarthy’s work deliberately traverses many mediums and disciplines to explore methods of storytelling.

Since 2012, much of his work is executed on his Brooklyn rooftop, engaging with the hundreds of domestic pigeons he is raising and flying. The cornerstone of his practice is the zine Born to Kill, begun in 2009 with 106 issues to date. Built by hand and printed on Xerox machines, the zines present poetic narratives of the experiments, constructions, and fugitive gestures of the artist.

McCarthy is a member of the collectives Satan Ceramics and 8 Ball Community. His work is in the collections of MoMA, New York; Fonds Régional d'Art Contemporain, Marseille; Museo Jumex, Mexico City; La Fab, Paris; and many libraries and private collections internationally.