Scott Penkava’s sculptures combine simplicity with eloquence, mash in a healthy dose of obviousness, and a tendency to often turn back unto themselves. Cunningly crafted, Scott Penkava’s Please come back I love you so much I can’t stand the sight of you, appears to pulled from a classic Warner Brothers’ cartoon, a random assortment of objects stacked in front of a door to keep the world at bay. Upon a moments inspection the objects reveal themselves to be junk cardboard covered in spray-paint. Shunning the aesthetics and the attitudes of hyperrealism, and adopting instead a Do It Yourself attitude to production, Scott Penkava’s soft-spoken form of trickery reveals itself only to fall back again, as the craft is just tight/sloppy enough to neither overly impress nor distract. The sculpture uses it’s own physicality to negate material irony, simply the sculpture presents itself as a posture, it states it’s own falseness explicitly and thus becomes a depiction of an obvious defense mechanism.

Scott Penkava never seems to shy away from a fight; in fact he seems prone to picking fights he knows that he can’t win. Responding to the indulgence and the power of the blue chip art world, Scott Penkava attacked the alpha male of the artworld with a simple, low tech and as usual questionably legal video. At first glance Mystery Science Cremaster 4 seems to be nothing more than a bootleg of Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 4. Sit with it for a moment and the video reveals itself as a collection of loudmouthed drunken college kids back-sassing Barney’s epic. Slinging beer cans and bullshit attempting to take down the closest thing to a pop star level artist that has been seen since Warhol; the audience gets their way with Barney, bringing him down out of the artworld mystique, and criticizing him with a method that is one part drunken art school brawl, and one part Mystery Science Theatre 3000.

Delicately phrased, and pathetically delivered, Scott Penkava’s Feminist Iconoclast is a mixture of sweet and salty that doesn’t allow too much room for ambivalence. While seemingly advocating violence against women, the shirt is an acknowledgement of the problems of gender related conditioning, and the problem of men being domestically abused. But not in such a way that it provides an opinion or a guiding principle. The implied rhetorical question, and an answer on a cocky quipy level, then printed on a t-shirt in a precise low-fi way that presents itself more as youth subculture mall trash than anything in the neighborhood of fine art. Thus deflating the statement through a seeming ubiquity and the illusion of non-authorship carried by commercial products.

Taking a sense of authorship born more from mix tapes than drawing classes, Scott Penkava is likely to bend any source to his own ends. Lifetime Impulse is a painting of a child’s runaway note that the artist has reascribed to himself. Creating an arc that connects the trajectory of a rambunctious, yet affectionate, child, to the disaffected rebellious teenager, to the idealistic and iconoclastic young man that he is today. Seeking a resolution between the desire to become an adult with the power and responsibility thereof and the nostalgia for freedom of position and imagination of a child, Scott Penkava brings them all together in this tiny memorial to the dream of becoming a Lost Boy, remaining in perpetual youth and discovery, acknowledging that while the common dream of letting it all go often seems only one step way, perhaps it is more important to always keep that dream close than actually live it.

J. Mascis sang, “I feel the pain in everyone/ Then I feel nothing.” As a Media Generation child Scott Penkava feels more alliance to Chuck Closterman’s analysis of popular culture as a serious text than to Walter Benjamin’s fear of social homogenization as a result of mass media. Thus, the failures of the icons of his youth become a real failure of the pillars that his perception of the world was based on. From Risky Business to Top Gun, Tom Cruise provided the role model for becoming a man to his entire generation, thus Cruise’s degeneration into a babbling religious zealot on national television produced a rift between the icon that he had loved and the failures of the man that this icon resided within. By removing all of Cruise’s dialogue from the film that he was promoting when he had his public meltdown and replacing it with the content of that meltdown, Scott Penkava honestly and playfully explores the consequences of a stars burning out.

The history of painting nudes and gestural mark making have long been acknowledged as nothing other than manifestations of objectification and egotism. In this and other works in his loving deemed “Idiot Paintings” series, Scott Penkava blatantly explores the same motivations from the other end of the spectrum. Simply rendered paintings of phrases that range from hubris, to treppenwitz, to simple faux pas; he commemorates the things that we wish we had said, the things that went too far, and those we wish we could say again. Elevating the sort of thing that when taken out of context and publicized could damage or ruin someone’s reputation, and instead taking ownership of the feelings that precipitated such comments.

Not willing to take no for an answer Scott Penkava chose to live out his dream to become the first artist to host SNL. In his mind closing the rift between the long severed worlds of art and popular culture, while of course maintaining his relentlessly self-aggrandizing oeuvre. Armed only with a VCR, a homemade green screen, and a far from professional knowledge of video editing; he highjacked this cultural touchstone and made it his own. Avoiding the simplicity of the one-liner, he contemplates his relationship to his desire to host the hippest show on television. Providing an auto critique of the work, first when he confronts his position as lone artist by acknowledging the patheticness of his homemade dream, and then as the video degenerates as he is joined by many further incarnations of himself endlessly babbling his name alone; humorously accusing himself, and by extension the audience, of the eternal crimes of screen culture, narcissism and voyeurism.