Melissa Johns is a multimedia visual artist and educator from a mixed Mohawk (Turtle Clan) and French Canadian background, born and based in Tkaronto. 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. Specializing in virtual reality installations, digital painting, and video art, Melissa’s work centers on investigating the narrative potential of these emergent channels. 

Melissa completed her undergraduate degree in Fine Arts & Business at the University of Waterloo, as well as an Advanced Diploma in 3D Animation from Humber College. Her graduate research at OCAD U centered on embedding cultural narratives and family histories in a virtual environment. Here I Stand, Still Guarded is an installation which facilitates emotional recollection through constructions of the spaces that shape us. 

Melissa Johns joined us at aabijijiwan media lab for a residency in the summer of 2022, playing with the space between real objects and her 3D ‘translations.’ These experiments in form led to both digital models and soft sculpture reproductions of historical Mohawk beadwork, a childhood stuffed animal, and her Grandmother’s embroidery. She plans to build these explorations into a full body of work. 

“I took these beaded whimsies that would have been sold as roadside souvenirs–probably near Niagara Falls–I have one that’s about forty years old and the others are closer to a hundred. I not only made 3D versions as usual, but I also endeavoured to make copies of them by hand as well. I sourced beads and fabric that were as close as I could get, I prototyped multiple iterations of each piece to get the shapes right, and then I spent hours and hours beading them side by side to the originals. 

When I build my 3D models, I’m usually optimizing them to run at 90 frames a second on a VR headset. For these models, I wanted to be able to go all out and make them as hyperreal as possible, instead of cutting corners in small ways for the sake of optimization. I’m so comfortable now making in 3D that the models turned out exactly as I wanted them to, but I caught myself frustrated with how the hand-made versions weren’t ‘close enough.’ I recognized through the process of making that this was equally to do with skill and with personal style. It’s easy to disguise my own hand in 3D, but with beadwork, I’m always present. I decided in the end to lean into that, and to put my own twist into these translations; I wanted my work to be in dialogue with the originals through time and space.”

Left: Sister 79, Unknown artist, Beadwork, 1979

Right: Sister 79/22, Soft sculpture, 2022