Desnivel is thrilled to present A Moment for You, an exhibition by Alina Tenser, taking place at Breeze Nail + Spa in the East Village. The exhibition is part of Desnivel’s ongoing effort to expand the traditional gallery model while engaging the East Village’s long history as a neighborhood shaped by artists, immigrant communities, and small business owners. Recently awarded a 2026 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, Tenser works across sculpture, video, performance, and interactive engagement, creating works that examine transformation, perception, labor, and material instability. For the occasion, the artist has created a special edition series of nails available exclusively at the salon.

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In the window of Breeze Nail + Spa, on 2nd Avenue, Alina Tenser’s video Relief 1 loops through its 01:42 minute run. Two disembodied hands outline, palm, and test the weight of an implied object, organizing fleeting form.

The hands are separated from the body that puppeteers them; in the nail salon, a site for editing bodies, this is not unusual. The spa abstracts the body into excerpts—fingers, nails, eyebrows, skin—each is both material and image. UV light hardens surfaces; hot towels loosen them. Signs read “EYELASH TINT!” and “DAZZLE DRY!🙂”

Amidst the spa’s samples of nail art, Tenser has introduced her own: a series pressed from steel, copper, and brass into what are known as “coffin-nails” in the beauty world. Their finishes refuse the ease of cosmetic glosswashing and carry a record of pressure and exposure (in this case, to vapors of salt, vinegar, and ammonia). The blooming patinas radiate happy-accident. They read as adornments and as small, stubborn objects, less about their own presentation than about the conditions that produced them. This includes the molds that are used to press them, also on display, which resemble caskets more than the “coffin-nails” that take shape in them. But perhaps because of Tenser’s stage magic language throughout the show, these slabs are less vampiric and more like the box a person enters before a magician saws them in half: And voila! A new you!

In Moment for You, a video playing inside the salon, a tabletop vibrates under an overhead camera. The artist (seen only as hands) places various objects on this trick table and they boogie outward until they slip from the edge and shatter on the floor, just out of view. The action repeats in variations made unpredictable by their physics.

In Climbing from Memory, a video near the pedicure station, disembodied hands, arms, and legs construct and navigate a ladder of PVC pipes, rung by rung, in midair; the artist kicks each away as she climbs. In another moment, the artist transforms rigid rings (poof!) into slack ribbons.

Both videos are driven by a procedural rhythm: If one accepts inevitability (the vibrating table), the other leans toward invention (the ladder). Together, they create a space between hope and collapse, where continuation itself is the subject.

An aside: I recently found a treasure at the sculptor Nancy Shaver’s Hudson, NY curiosity shop, Henry. It’s a bubblegum pink leather cigarette case monogrammed with the initials “M.A.M.” Inside are compartments for a capsule-shaped lighter (present), a little brown comb (present), a square powder compact (present), and one for an object that is no longer there, perhaps never was. Rather than guess at the missing piece or long for its presence, I welcomed this empty “coffin” as an imperfection, despite it being an object for the M.A.M. who has it all figured out—one whose femme subjecthood is legible, precise, organized.

-Christine Kelly