Jeff Starr: The Wrath of Grapes

"Brokenborough," which has a brighter palette, is similar to "Freedonia," with structures covering a bizarre precipice. But Starr pushes the precarious narrative even further by having some elements sticking out of the side of the mountain, seemingly hanging by a thread.

Throughout his career, Starr has embraced surrealism, which was in a big-time revival when he entered the scene. And its influence is easy to see in these preposterous views of towns, landscapes and skies, but none makes the case more clearly than "We Lived Here," where the houses are in the trees. According to Starr's artist statement, there's a utopian quality to these depictions of preposterous human settlements, but they're actually more obviously dystopian.

Related to these are paintings of tree stumps that Starr has laden with symbolism. The conventionalized tree stump in "My Way," and the much simpler one in "Selective Memory," where an ax is also in the picture, are meant to suggest the idea of distress. Starr has written that he picked up the concept of having a stump suggest distress from nineteenth-century landscape painters, who used them for the same reason. Though Starr has said that his odd style of depicting the stumps comes right out of late medieval German art, there's also a lot of Warner Brothers in them.

The stump paintings provide a direct link to Starr's ceramic sculptures; in fact, "Hold Everything" actually is a stump. It turns out that despite his reputation as a painter, Starr turned his back on the medium from 2000 to 2005 and exclusively made ceramics. As with painting, Starr taught himself how to do it, with a class or two at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities. And in a relatively short time, he became an expert at modeling, casting, firing and glazing. (An assortment of his earliest efforts in clay is displayed in the MCA library, on the first floor. The modest pieces, which date from 1990 or so, are conceptually related to his most recent ceramic sculptures.)

The most significant of the Starr ceramics is the bigger-than-life-sized bust "Wymond," a cartoonish and somewhat creepy portrait of a kid who used to work at Twist & Shout. The ceramic head is mounted onto a steel rod attached to a steel-plate base. "Wymond" has quite a visual punch and manages to look even stranger than Starr's other odd-looking portrait heads of young guys. He's smoothed out the clay surfaces of the subjects' face and hair, which makes them seem hard and unnatural. The otherworldliness is heightened by the vaguely naturalistic colors he uses and by the exaggeration of the subject's features, made more manifest by the large scale.

I'm happy Payton has established this Colorado-friendly program, and Jeff Starr: The Wrath of Grapes was a great choice for the inaugural show.