Your Birth is My Birth, a collaboration between artists Merryn Omotayo Alaka and Sam Frésquez, feels at once vast and intimate. Entering the show at Jane Lombard Gallery is like stepping into a fantastical yet strangely comforting grove — what the artists call their “Kanekalon forest” after the synthetic hair brand, a continuation of their ongoing Hairland series begun in 2017.
Created from the textured fiber, enormous biomorphic sculptures cascade from the ceiling and emerge from the ground. Kanekalon hair, sold crimped, becomes smooth only with heat. To achieve the silky texture in these works, the artists steamed, cut, and sewed together lengths of hair by hand, clamping the strands to welded metal structures.
The material recalls the communal, multigenerational experience of caring for hair and the central role it plays in forming queer, gender, and racial identity, particularly in Black and Latine communities. Omotayo Alaka and Frésquez have drawn on this principle to craft a visual language of their own, in which Kanekalon hair serves as the regenerative source material for an imagined world populated by several speculative species, including the “Stacking Pearl” and “Hearing Bells” (both 2026).
