Aptly timed to close out the spring season in Tribeca, Merryn Omotayo Alaka and Sam Frésquez’sYour Birth is My BirthatJane Lombard Gallery exudes a sense of fantastical play from the threshold of the gallery’s open door where warm, vernal air drifts in. Upon entry, the grand scale of the installation beckons viewers into a mutual dance, as one weaves around, under, and through the works. Closer contact with the sculptures reveals their material, pounds and pounds of Kanekalon hair, a popular synthetic hair product found in beauty shops around the globe. You can almost hear the sculptures, the thick, lush swooshes of tails, the rustle of strands flowing out in a radial pool on the gallery floor. The works hanging from the ceiling shift with subtle pendulum momentum, leaning into their own weight and the slight circulation of air within the gallery. The movements of the works and their organic, undulating forms mimic the terrestrial world of forests and even ocean depths.
Working as a collaborative duo, the installation is Omotayo Alaka’s and Frésquez’s newest iteration of their series Hairland, which the artists began roughly a decade ago as undergraduate students. Informed by a synthesis of influences across botany, science fiction, material and pop culture (the exhibition title comes from the television series I May Destroy You), the artists distill a clear language that scaffolds the speculative ecosystem on view. Consisting of five works termed species—Listening Roots, Hearing Bells, Mother & Child, Stacking Pearls, and Umbra Pods (all 2026)—Omotayo Alaka and Frésquez envision the work as a total world that the artists term the “Kanekalon forest,” creating a species chart describing each species’ life cycle in detail.
The affinities between hair and plant life are plentiful: both shed, display signs of disease, and decay slowly. Extremely responsive and resilient, hair and plants react to the elements, particularly water, air, and the sun. They nestle in abundance, coalescing whole forms out of many with individual strands of hair akin to blades of grass or the bounty of flora that makes up forests. Deeply connected to time, they leave behind traces of their existence, both witness and archive. Literally animate, hair and plant matter shift, overlap, and become entangled. Humans interact with hair and botany with a ritual reverence as emblems of healing, protection, and care, emphasizing maintenance and metamorphic transformation.
Perhaps the most salient connection between hair and botanicals is their relationship to roots and their ability to regenerate, possessing the power of growth. Inversely, they also hold vast records of history and information passed down across generations of evolutionary time. In Your Birth is My Birth, Omotayo Alaka and Frésquez evidence the poignant and relatable expression of a common need for both grounding and extension found in hair, plants, and all shared existence.
