WHO

Sam Pocker is a multidisciplinary artist whose work navigates the overlooked and the overexposed, using media, performance, and documentation to interrogate the rituals of daily life in the early 21st century. Working across photo collage, video, live performance, and archival installation, Pocker constructs a deliberately unstable relationship between authenticity, absurdity, and authority.

Whether rephotographing fast food as devotional iconography, performing ritualistic disassemblies of viral sandwiches, or exploring the emotional architecture of roadside America, Pocker treats the mundane as a site of recursive meaning. His art resists the conventional urge to elevate pop culture into seriousness; instead, it collapses form and content into gestures that are simultaneously precise and destabilizing.

His early photographic works paired artifacts of late 20th-century design with familiar masterworks of art history, revealing compositional echoes between Renaissance portraiture and promotional ketchup packets. These carefully constructed juxtapositions examined shared aesthetics between cultural permanence and cultural repetition — not to judge, but to observe.

Over time, Pocker’s work expanded into moving image and live performance, increasingly using platform-native formats as raw material. The long-form video cycle fastfoodlegend emerged not as parody, but as a committed investigation into the aesthetics of failure. Here, Pocker applies a methodology of “intentional stupidity” — a form of practiced naivety rooted in the legacies of punk performance, outsider television, and vernacular satire. He executes these works with near-scientific rigor: multi-angle documentation, engineered lighting for food decay, and meticulous timing that allows a single taco wrapper to become both prop and participant.

Beyond his work with food media, Pocker has documented and reimagined transitional American spaces — abandoned casinos, prototype motels, derelict diners — treating these environments as collaborative agents in his practice. He approaches these settings not as ruins, but as unresolved narratives. The act of filming, inhabiting, or even just cataloguing these places becomes a form of site-specific performance.

Throughout all his projects runs a deep interest in the mechanics of media itself: how formats dictate meaning, how repetition functions as both mnemonic device and visual erosion, and how humor can serve as a delivery system for complex cultural critique. He has worked in formats ranging from experimental music video to immersive installation, often merging analog and digital tools in ways that frustrate easy categorization.

His process is one of accumulation and decay — not simply gathering material, but letting it fall apart in plain sight. By embracing waste, error, and excess as compositional tools, Pocker builds works that resist conclusion. What looks like chaos is often a durational performance; what appears thoughtless is the result of architectural-level precision.

Sam Pocker’s practice is a sustained inquiry into how meaning is made, misunderstood, and misused — especially in public. His work asks not what we believe, but how we perform belief, how we document it, and how we forget it.