ARTIST STATEMENT

Ever since I was a child, I have been fascinated by the concept of memories. I distinctly remember thinking to myself as a little girl that if I just replayed every memory I wanted to hold onto every night before I went to sleep, that I would never forget. As I grew older and my list of memories grew longer, photography became a natural medium for capturing mementos of the life around me.

I am a compulsive documentarian, and the photos I take are the visual cues to my memory bank—to those moments of joy, sadness, exhilaration, anger, contemplation, inspiration, love, boredom, beauty, etc. that I observed or experienced for myself. I have found that while the memories behind the photographs are very personal to me, that the emotions or feelings behind them are often readily accessible to others who view my photographs.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Sarah-Ji was born in Seoul, Korea in 1972 and immigrated to the north side of Chicago with her family in the late 1970s. This dramatic move may be one of the reasons that she became so interested in the power of memories to form identities and the ways in which a person can “not forget.” She has been taking photos in one form or another since she was a teenager. She bought her first digital camera in 2002, and as a result, her photographic documentation of life became much more compulsive (and affordable). Around the same time, she jumped into the world of photoblogging, through which she has been sharing her photos and stories of everyday life online.

She is a proud contributor to Shutter Sisters, a global online community of women photographers, and to Kimchi Mamas, a collaborative blog of mothers of children of Korean heritage. Her photos have appeared on gapersblock.com, chicagopublicradio.org, npr.org, chicagoreader.com, pastemagazine.com,  the print editions of the Chicago Reader and Paste Magazine, and countless Myspace and Facebook profiles. She is proud to have been one of the Visual Artists accepted to participate in the 2008 Around the Coyote Fall Festival.

Sarah-Ji lives in Chicago with her homebrewing drummer husband Ted and their rambunctious preschool-aged daughter Cadence Joy. When she's not taking photos, Sarah-Ji daydreams about Metropolis lattés, the Pacific Northwest and running an urban hostel. Her passions are mindful parenting, making mix CDs, creating/finding community, reconstructing t-shirts and the voices of Sam Beam, Sufjan Stevens, Neil Halstead and Jeff Tweedy.