Born in Portland, Oregon in 1961, Kris Haas is a self-taught visual artist whose abstract practice explores memory, perception, material, and time. Working across painting, collage, and increasingly sculptural surfaces, Haas uses abstraction to give form to experiences that exist beneath language—where memory shifts, perception fractures, and the physical act of making becomes a way of understanding what cannot always be explained.
Living with a brain injury has profoundly shaped Haas’s relationship to memory and perception, but her work does not attempt to illustrate that experience. Instead, it emerges through process. Paint is layered, scraped, buried, exposed, fractured, and rebuilt. Cloth, sand, plaster, concrete, ink, charcoal, and other materials become part of a visual language in which contradiction is allowed to remain: fragility alongside weight, restraint alongside disruption, absence alongside accumulation.
Across bodies of work including Disjointed Reality, Displaced Memories, Tactile Commodity, and The Breath of Memory,Haas has continually returned to the instability of memory and the question of what remains when familiar structures begin to shift. Her newest body of work, Excavating Through Time, pushes that inquiry further into physical space. Dense monochromatic surfaces become almost archaeological—built, disturbed, and excavated until light itself reveals ridges, fissures, remnants, and buried gestures.
For Haas, abstraction is not an escape from reality. It is a way of entering it more deeply.
Her work has been exhibited for more than two decades, commissioned for public and corporate spaces, featured in television productions, and held in private and corporate collections. She lives and works in Portland, Oregon.
