M. Carson Day / Work / blue/bird/boy



POPsicle (what is always sad), 2024, acrylic paint on poplar, 97” x 8” x 1.75”





[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.





POPsicle (what is always sad) at Comfort Station, Chicago in 2025



blue boy after blue boy after blue boy, 2024, found object: a lithographic print in halftone of a poorly rendered copy of Thomas Gainsborough’s 1770 painting The Blue Boy, 9” x 11” framed
Occupiers, 2025, oil on panel, 6” x 8”
bluebird of happiness, 2024, oil on panel, 8” x 10” 
Selected Poems (André Breton), 2023, graphite on paper, 22” x 27.25”
Tyltyl  (blue/egg/boy), 2025, oil on panel, 20” x 30”
POPsicle (what is always sad) (detail), 2024, acrylic paint on poplar, 97” x 8” x 1.75”
untitled surrealist combine (comedian 2), 2023, popsicle stick, tape, library book (Selected Poems of André Breton, ca. 1969), 4.5” x 7.25”