Melissa Naef
Dawson, Yukon
ARTIST BIO
As a Yukon-based artist, Melissa uses her surrounding environment and community as a primary influence in her work. With her unique heritage of Swiss roots with a Northern Canadian upbringing, her work explores and expresses the idea of identity, interpersonal relationships, and the meaning of home. Through the use of analogue and alternative photographic processes, Melissa's works encompass land, community and materiality in an intimate experience.
Melissa is most recently a graduate of NSCAD University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a major in photography. At NSCAD, she was the recipient of the Roloff Benny Scholarship and the 2025 NSCAD Student Art Award in Photography, both for her debut monograph, Tailings.
"Melissa's photos are full of care for the place she grew up, and her work captures what life is like up here far beyond, and far more tenderly, than the vast expanses of wilderness we are known for." – Aubyn O’Grady, Program Director at the Yukon School of Visual Arts
PROJECT STATEMENT
“Tailings explores the characteristics of Dawson City, Yukon, through long-form documentary photography. It speaks of life in the far northern, and gives voice to the homebodies, and reminisces in the glory days. Through an exploration of Dawson City, this collection of photographs is a personal love letter to home and an ode to the triumphs, defeats and daily rhythms of Northern life.
Dawson City, once the epicenter of the Klondike Gold Rush, sits on the traditional territory of the Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin First Nation. It is a town that resists forgetting. Its vast landscapes, eccentric characters and enduring celebrations, all testify to a spirit that has long thrived at the edge of wilderness and history. For me, Dawson is not simply a destination, but it is the place that shaped me, as a constant presence that informs my way of experience. It's a place I call home.
Yet to call it a “hometown” is not to overlook its complexities. Beneath the colour and light-hearted nature exist harder truths: cycles of addiction, a housing crisis, limited opportunities, and landscapes scarred by gold mining. Dawson’s resilience and spirit coexist with these ongoing challenges, creating a tension that is inseparable from its identity.
Tailings navigates this tension through a mix of images on black and white, and colour film, snapshot-like documentary 35mm imagery accompanied formal medium format stillness evoke both the fleeting and the enduring, the unpolished and the deliberate. In weaving these perspectives, the work acknowledges Dawson not only as a backdrop but as a living, complicated community. It is a place of resilience, memory, and continual reinvention. “ – Melissa Naef
Tailings by Melissa Naef was self-published in a limited edition of 80 copies.
LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
In the spirit of reconciliation, we acknowledge that the Exposure Photography Festival is situated on land adjacent to where the Bow River meets the Elbow River. The traditional Blackfoot name of this place is “Moh’kins’tsis”, which we now call the City of Calgary. This is the traditional Treaty 7 territory of the Blackfoot confederacy: Siksika, Kainai, Piikani as well as the Îyâxe Nakoda and Tsuut’ina nations. It is home to the Métis Nation of Alberta, Region 3 within the historical Northwest Métis homeland. We honour and acknowledge all Nations, who live, work and play in Moh’kins’tsis, help steward this land, and honour and celebrate this territory.