The Joke Goes Down Easy

All that glitters isn’t gold; sometimes it’s discarded aluminum cans that Sam Keller bedazzles with Swarovski crystals. 

The L.A.-based artist returns to Austin for “Aftertaste,” his second solo show at Martha’s. The body of work presented initially goes down fast and easy, much like the consumables they riff on: sparkly soda cans, Juul vapes arranged into the shape of a cellphone tower (How bad for you could it be?), a hyperreal bronze cast of a droopy pizza slice (Sad Slice), a model of the White House constructed with McDonald’s french fries (Ancient Grease). If your eyes follow the string of Buzzball lights hung up just below the ceiling, they eventually land on a paper sculpture resembling the security cameras commonly mounted in corner stores. The piece is neither for sale nor listed in the exhibition documentation on Martha’s website. The discrete artwork becomes part of the gallery’s atmosphere, establishing an ambient condition of surveillance. Though the upfront jokes are immediately palatable, the lingering sense of unease that Keller’s objects leave you with is harder to place.

It seems the sensation arises in part from the body’s conspicuous absence. Each individual object in the show suggests the presence of the agent required to use it: the hand that crushes a can, lifts a Juul to the mouth, steadies a drooping pizza slice, or pinches a french fry. The catalysts of these actions only register as a trace or suggestion, sometimes hilariously so. Taking the Piss, for example, adopts the sleek geometry of a modernist sculpture. The powder-coated steel work begins at roughly hip height before curving downward into a bright yellow puddle on the floor. It seems to complete itself only when a viewer steps behind the metal stream to briefly lend it their body in a pose that feels almost designed for circulation on Instagram.

Nearby, Big Monster Energy stands roughly as tall as the average person. It supersizes an energy drink into a makeshift guillotine structure. A consumer product marketed as fuel becomes a politically charged instrument. The object implies a threat, but no one is deputized to operate it. Like Taking the Piss, the sculpture waits for a body to complete its suggestive action, though here the invitation is far less playful. The works refer to an immediate, intimate feeling of control, but that power ends at the object’s surface.

There is something eerie about the way Keller’s objects seem to summon absent figures to animate them, as though staging a séance for a lost sense of agency. What does it mean for an object loaded with political implications to appear in the form of a branded commodity? Does Big Monster Energy suggest that even our fantasies of agency now reach us through the limited gesture of consumption? With Ancient Grease, Keller’s house of fries, positioned at the dead center of the gallery, these questions become harder to ignore.

Make a beeline past all the garish objects to the wall farthest from the entrance and you’ll find a mockup of Keller’s BFA diploma hanging flat, signed by the artist himself where the university president would normally autograph. By then, it is clear Keller is a funny guy. But beyond the immediate joke, the work ties together his layered reflections on value, the artist as brand, and the aura of capital in the contemporary world. It is no coincidence that this institutional stamp of approval the piece riffs on is more expensive than the other objects Keller works with. 

Keller’s compressed visual jokes land with the speed of posts in the feed. They remind me of the fleeting laughs and familiar dopamine crash of scrolling through Instagram. Those of us who are chronically online are familiar with consuming too many images and videos that eventually disappear into the ether, the rapid boom and bust of hype culture, and the social amplification made possible with personal brand identities. It is very apropos that the artist’s Instagram handle is @sam_big_gulp. 

In both form and affect, the body of work feels both native to, and critical of, the age of disposability. Keller does not redeem the objects he presents to us as relics of our consumption so much as he prolongs our contact with them. His interventions prevent these items from disappearing on schedule, leaving us to wonder whether our consumption patterns have become not only how we assign value, but how we imagine our capacity to act.

This article appears in August 7 • 2026.