ARTIST STATEMENT
Michael Lonchar makes working class art. Using materials, techniques, and ideas rooted in solidarity with working people, he creates large-scale installations that blend emotion, memory, and critiques of labor under capitalism. His work comes from his perspective as a laborer; someone navigating exploitation, instability, and heartbreak.
Primarily trained as a woodworker, Lonchar incorporates video, photography, audio, kinetic sculpture, and performance to construct complex emotional situations. These works resist easy sentimentality: instead of depicting connection, they emphasize its absence; instead of celebrating family, they confront its loss. Through this lens, his installations explore alienation as a defining condition of contemporary life.
Lonchar’s process begins with personal experience, often through journaling, which he translates into symbolic forms and spatial narratives. While rooted in autobiography, these works expand into broader reflections on systemic issues, particularly those surrounding labor and mental health, while remaining grounded in familiar, interpersonal experiences.
His work situates the personal within the structural, using lived experience as a way to navigate and reflect the conditions that shape it.
BIO
Michael Lonchar was born in 1997 in Waterbury, Connecticut. He began his studies at the Maine College of Art, focusing on graphic design and sculpture, before transferring to the Minneapolis College of Art and Design to pursue their Web + Multimedia program, where he concentrated on video and installation. He received his BFA in 2019. In 2025, he earned his MFA from the University of South Florida, with a focus on sculpture, woodworking, and digital fabrication. Since then, he has taught at USF as an adjunct instructor of sculpture, video, foundations, and furniture design.
Lonchar has exhibited at several notable institutions and festivals, including Franconia Sculpture Park in Minnesota, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Portland, Maine, Currents New Media Festival in Santa Fe, New Mexico, The 2025 Ink Miami Art Fair in Miami, Florida, and the Contemporary Art Museum in Tampa, Florida. Most recently, his work was included in the 2026 Wiregrass Biennial at the Wiregrass Museum of Art in Dothan, Alabama.
michaelloncharart@gmail.com
@michael_lonchar
