Opening Reception: Friday, August 22, 5-7 PM
Mike Howat | Exhibition Statement Home, Disassembled explores the meanings of home, place, and displacement. Through his work, Howat uses architectural forms as a framework to delve into both personal and collective narratives. He is particularly interested in how built environments reflect their inhabitants and how buildings become records of those who occupy them.
In 2024, Howat experienced a renovation eviction, becoming the last permanent resident of a 251-year-old property before leaving New England. One of the works in this exhibition, Door From the Apartment I Was Evicted From (The Locks Didn’t Work Anyway), is a to-scale recreation of a door from that apartment, which was removed during the renovation process. This exhibition serves as a way to explore the sometimes-fleeting meaning of home and the memories contained in spaces. The Window Paintings emerged as a way to construct images from the perspective of an intimate interior space. The still lifes were painted directly from observations made within the apartment, while the exteriors depict memories of surrounding places. The works also suggest the viewpoint of a neighboring apartment looking inward, offering a dual sense of observation. On the windowsills, objects that reflect the present moment and hold emotional significance—such as books, dead flowers, and coffee pots—are scattered. These paintings create a collage of landscape, still life, and interior, drawing from various locations, objects, and memories, all united by a shared light that creates a cohesive sense of space.
Other works in the exhibition, such as the Gable Studies and Window Studies, shift away from the personal. These pieces are generic and collective, referencing the ubiquitous vernacular icons of historic New England architecture. They are both familiar and entirely anonymous.
Mike Howat | Biography Mike Howat is a painter and educator working between New Hampshire and Greenville, South Carolina. His work investigates themes of urbanization, Americana, and collective memory, often through the lens of architectural forms. Buildings and built environments act as vessels in his paintings—conduits for exploring regional identity, personal history, and the evolution of place.
He earned his BFA from the New Hampshire Institute of Art in 2014 and has exhibited nationally, with recent shows at Cove Street Arts, Greenhut Galleries (Portland, ME), the Rochester Museum of Fine Arts, Nahcotta, Talon Gallery (Portland, OR), Carrie Secrist Gallery (Chicago), and Nucleus Portland. In 2022, Howat was Artist-in-Residence at Gallery 263 in Cambridge, MA, and previously held a long-term residency at Kimball Jenkins School of Art in Concord, NH. Since 2022, he has coordinated ArtReach at AVA, a regional program offering online studio visits, interviews, and exhibition tours with artists and curators across the Northeast.
As an artist-curator, Howat began curating in 2018 at Kimball Jenkins and has since collaborated on exhibitions with the Rochester Museum of Fine Arts and other venues. In 2023, he co-founded PILLAR Gallery + Projects in Concord, NH, fostering contemporary art programming in the region.
Mike Howat | Artist Statement Mike Howat’s work explores vernacular architecture and themes of collective memory, urban isolation, and contemporary Americana. At its core, his paintings investigate the dynamic relationship between people and built spaces—how we occupy them, and how they, in turn, leave their marks on us. Collage and assembled imagery from different places, offering unifying elements through light and careful articulation of form.
His focus is primarily on transient spaces with layered histories, such as ever-changing storefronts, historic apartment buildings, or places where he’s lived temporarily. These buildings act as vessels for memory, holding traces of human presence over time. Drawing is central to his process, incorporating materials such as graphite, mixed media, constructed panels, and successive layers of thin paint to evoke the physicality and construction of these environments.
To view images of artwork in Mike Howat’s exhibition, click here
