Daughter of Hungarian refugees, artist Monika Petroczy has the unique perspective of living on the fringes of both American and Hungarian cultures.
Mastering graphic design through a long career as a cartographer, she became a web and design professional, and later a muralist and street painter/chalk maddonara. Having seen photography as foundational to supporting her art and design work, she decided to learn the art of photography for herself. Discovering her own eye for photography, she took it on through her father’s decades old film camera and digital media. Monika enjoys using both film and digital photography as well as paint, chalk, and digital tools.
Monika specializes in spoofery, bringing humor and joy to existing cultural memes. A child of the 80s and a fan of nostalgia, her images explore color, shape, light and mystery in the ordinary. It is said that art and fitness don’t go together, yet she takes on balancing health, fitness, and the sport of ultimate frisbee while practicing the arts. She maintains a small aviary of chickens in her spare time in Ventura, California and dreams of her own homestead.
“A camera teaches you how to see without a camera. Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still. A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.”
“The photographer’s most important and likewise most difficult task is not learning to manage his camera, or to develop, or to print. It is learning to see photographically – that is, learning to see his subject matter in terms of the capacities of his tools and processes, so that he can instantaneously translate the elements and values in a scene before him into the photograph he wants to make.”
“it’s always been my philosophy to try to make art out of the everyday and ordinary…it never occurred to me to leave home to make art.”