The Docks

Melissa Johns | Kanien’kehá/French Canadian
CAN | 2021 | VR 
All ages

Sit here for as long as you need. Listen and yearn. Watch the dark horizon until you disappear. Deeply personal, The Docks is a static VR work which manifests long-known feelings of otherness and yearning, made to facilitate the artist’s cultural healing journey. The Docks is a fabricated space, intentionally mythologized; an incarnation of longing and otherness, a resting place for old wounds. Those familiar and ambivalent feelings now have a place to live: one which I can return to, and more importantly, one which I can move forward from.

Based in Tkaronto, Melissa Johns is a multimedia visual artist and educator from a mixed Mohawk (Turtle Clan) and French Canadian background. Melissa’s visual practice manifests at the convergence of contemporary media, using interdisciplinary methods to collect, preserve, and transform fragments of the stories around her.