Trenzado
Katiushka Melo Green
11. 23 - 12.15
An Exhibition about hair and earth
SALON | 224 Roebling St. BK
Opening 11.23 | 4-7p
Performance by Katiushka Melo Green & Aru Apaza
Hair holds profound cultural, spiritual, and symbolic significance. It is a reflection of one’s identity, connection to ancestry, and relationship to the natural world. Hair also carries stories and ancestral memories, serving as a link between past and future generations, while its care and grooming are seen as acts of cultural preservation. The word trenzado in Spanish means braided or the interweaving of three strands, crossing them alternately to form a single elongated body. The act of braiding itself can symbolize harmony, balance, and the interconnectedness of all living things. Braids are used in rituals and ceremonies, where they symbolize harmony and the balance between the physical and spiritual worlds.
In the exhibition, the intertwined histories of braiding hair and pottery are explored, two practices that have deep cultural significance across time and geography. Through a series of sculptures, the show reflects on how these traditions serve as methods of storytelling, identity, and memory. Braiding, a practice rooted in both necessity and artistry, has been used to communicate social roles, cultural heritage, and familial bonds. Pottery, similarly, holds both functional and symbolic value, with each vessel shaped by hands that carry the weight of generations.
The works in this exhibition bring together these two art forms, revealing how they echo each other in form and purpose. Braids are transformed into sculptural objects, and ceramic pieces take on the rhythmic patterns and textures of woven hair, in some pieces human hair added to the ceramic pieces. Together, they offer a meditation on the ways in which humans have used material to shape and preserve identity, whether through the pliable strands of hair or the molded earth of pottery. The pottery in this exhibition, once crafted for everyday use—be it for cooking, storage, or ritual—has been re-imagined and transformed by the inclusion of human hair woven directly into the clay. This radical alteration strips the vessels of their original function, leaving behind a metaphorical commentary on the intersection of material culture and identity. The presence of hair within the pottery speaks to the ways in which the human body and its labor are intertwined with the objects we create and use. Pottery, traditionally a marker of cultural and communal life, is no longer simply functional. Now, as vessels woven with hair, they become something more complex: markers of ritual, memory, and the blurred boundaries between the human and the object.
Through this juxtaposition, the intertwining of human hair with pottery challenges the boundaries between utilitarianism and symbolism, inviting a conversation about the ways in which crafts—braiding, pottery, and beyond—are repositories of cultural knowledge and historical continuity. In these works, the materials speak, not just to their makers, but to the long history of labor, resilience, and the shaping of identity in Latin America.
About Katiushka Melo Green:
Katiushka (b. 1977) is a Hudson-based interdisciplinary artist, born in New York and raised by Chilean parents.
Her work often addresses the challenging questions around the role and representation of women in modern society, specifically women of color. The physicality of her actions and repetitiveness found in her performances addresses the challenges women face both culturally and socially. They are cathartic and ritualistic. Much of her artwork materializes as a sort of rite, orchestrated to symbolize the perpetual repetitive cycles of life, from rebirth and renewal into womanhood, from ancestor to the body one occupies. Her work is about loss of identity, as a first generation non immigrant, as a child of parents who fled their country shed of its identity by a right wing authoritarian military dictatorship. She explores the feeling of otherness throughout her work while still embracing her feminine mysticism and connection to earth. She wants to disrobe the perceived difference in many spheres including gender, race and geography and often mirrors the unsettling judgment of racism, discrimination, appropriation and feelings of otherness all while asking us to consider the spiritual, ethereal and physical connection to body and earth.
Her work has been exhibited in the Americas, Europe and Asia, most recently at Miami Art Basel and a solo show at Veracruzana Cultural Center for the Arts in Mexico.