@ Artist's Space: Salad Days 3: I never asked for anything, please don't let me down again

This is the essay that Teneille Haggard wrote about me in the catalog for the summer show in '08 at Artist's Space.

I met Scott Penkava at his MFA exhibition at Hunter College. In the gallery I awkwardly
climbed onto his work which was –a life- sized, slanted, shingled roof- top, where we
played pool. I lost. The work reminded me of my ranch- style childhood home:, the
same roof, the same pool table, the same depressed lighting and sense of unease and
disorientation. Scott is very tall. I am very short. We look quite funny together. No
more funny than learning that we had groewn just up a few miles and a few years apart,
many miles away from New York. Outside of his studio, he Scott showed me a grocery
cart of filled with bricks he had picked up from scavenging around the city streets. He proposed assembling a wishing well of sorts for this exhibition.

The traditions of Chistoph Büchel, Mike Kelley, and Rirkrit Tiravanija are evident in his
Scott’s use of found objects, his site-specific installations, and his social engagement, and
site specific installations. The works’ formalism present in the works is overridden by
his a sense of theatricality and inclusion of performance. When Scott proposed building
a wishing well, a scene from Goonies came to my mind, in which. In the movie the
character Mouth decides to take back the his coins and reclaim his the wishes that never
came true. There is something both wondrous and disturbing about the act of exchanging
tokens exchanged for wishes. Scott incorporates a deadpan wit and sense play in this
work, but ultimately creatinges an experiment without predictability, conclusion, or end.