[10] Scanga's materials included natural objects like branches and seashells, as well as kitsch figurines, castoff musical instruments and decorative trinkets salvaged from flea markets and thrift shops.
Scanga—through a vocabulary of basic tools, icons, and foodstuffs, reworked in a very personal way—attempts to restore the original sense of the peasant world: the realities of hard work or religious devotion, often ameliorated by civilized sentimentality.
While there is no single source for Scanga's work, many of the stories, traditions, and superstitions retold in through adumbrated saints and basketed scythes are native to the folk-life of southern Italy.
Whether religious or secular in content, Scanga's works of the past decade[clarification needed] are the artist's reflections on the immutable, universal aspects of peasant life.
Some, like the series of Italian photographs, are intensely personal, while others use a more generally recognized set of images—old farm tools, wooden bowls or large plaster statues of Saint Joseph and the Madonna.
Far from being an attempt at humor or funk, Scanga's choice of the white (sometimes called Irish) potato is in fact a perfect conflation of symbols for the peasant life he intends to evoke.
Beneath their dry brown exterior is a moist, crisp flesh—a humble organic metaphor for the meager existence of the rural working class.
The politics that concern Scanga here are not specific to Italy, in fact this particular source of inspiration is derived from a different peasant culture, the rural class of Ireland.
Waves of economic and social upheaval raced through the poor rural class as did epidemics of cholera, typhus, dysentery and scurvy.
Scanga's research revealed that it was not simply the blight and natural forces that caused so enormous a loss, but the presence in Ireland of a domineering political force—Great Britain.
In a very real sense, Scanga's work is anti-historical, as he tries to undo what the selectivity of history made palatable—he searches for the primal impact, the distilled significance of what really happened—not just facts and figures but sensibility.
Scanga died of heart failure at age 69 on July 27, 2001, at his Turquoise Street studio in Pacific Beach in San Diego, California.