Join us in celebration of the opening of M. Carson Day’s exhibition, blue/bird/boy.
blue/bird/boy
work by M. Carson Day
October 4 – 26, 2025
on view Sundays
11 a – 2 p
[A popsicle stick upon which a joke is printed]:
“What bird is always sad? A bluebird.”
[Crickets.]
blue/bird/boy is an exploration of the moment when the joke fails and becomes poetry — an experiment in pushing the punchline beyond its ability to maintain a capacity for humor; a scattered denouement that follows delivery when the bottom falls out of the joke and its contents snowball into new compositions, line by line by line. Heavily influenced by the Surrealists, the exhibition represents a series of associative arrivals that collectively form a disjointed visual poem composed of brazen wordplay and authorial ambiguity. As such, the work links a found popsicle stick to Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy — by way of a rubber chicken — tracing one of infinite threads toward an open end, while weaving together fragments of the Western canon, American history, kitsch and the fertile lossiness of art reproduction and translation.
M. Carson Day (b. 1989) is a Chicago-based artist interrogating American capitalism with poetics and deadpan humor. Invoking his professional experience as an artist assistant and fabricator, his practice attempts to balance prop comedy and critical theory, where the fabricated object and the found object meet as the physical junction of art, work, value, class, Americana and satire. He has studied art at Indiana University Bloomington, Glasgow School of Art in Glasgow, Scotland, Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, Italy and the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), where he received an MFA in 2025.
Some of his recent works include – fatal 4-way, or a 4-plait braided conference call, a poem for 4 voices recorded as a 4-channel sound piece, comprised entirely of found text from “masculine” literature and professional wrestling magazines from the late twentieth century; Our TowneTM, an expanding body of work that toes the perimeter of theater by expanding a hobby model kit, depicting an idealistic American main street, into full-scale narrative space wherein the kit becomes the setting, the stage and the lead performer.