Paul Harris: Shut-In Suite, 1969–1970

Shown for the first time at the Portland Art Museum, Shut-In Suite by Paul Harris takes the viewer on a voyage through the artist’s physical and imaginative surroundings. In 1969, Harris received a fellowship from the Tamarind Institute of Lithography in Los Angeles, one of the premier print ateliers in the country. While there, he conceived of his suite. He recalls, “I lived alone in a rundown LA apartment amidst my own disorder. I had not intended to make a Shut-in Suite . . . there was just no time to go out into the world. I shuttled between the apartment and the print center for three months. At the end of the second month I realized that my world was first, a crummy apartment and second, my imagination.” Reduced to his thoughts and immediate surroundings, Harris created tableaux that simultaneously express isolation as well as the beauty and magic of everyday life. Through dramatic cropping, extreme close-ups devoid of context, and compositions that hover near abstraction and decoration, Harris’s suite coalesces into a group that is dreamlike and elliptical, suggestive of memory and half-formed stories.