Alina Tenser’s installation “Reading Room,” at Crush Curatorial, centers on a waist-high, S-shaped wooden table with a fabric-covered top. On it she has placed four open-topped acrylic boxes lined with synthetic suede. Two of them are attached to each other, and the other two are free-standing, for a total of three discrete constructions, each of which is entered on the show’s checklist as a separate piece (“Volume 1: Twinning,” “Volume 2: False Bottom” and “Volume 3: Spider Splay”) along with the whole display.
The boxes are held together with a mix of hinges and magnets, so that anyone with good faith and clean hands can unfold them into three flat crosses, one green, one purple, one gray. Or, if a previous visitor left them flat, you could fold them up again. Or you could fold up one, unfold another and leave the third untouched — and so on. The options are all in front of you. The only thing you can’t do is arrive at a configuration that’s either final or complete.
