Zevel
Zachary Z. Handler
The night I called my grandfather to tell him I finally got my Hebrew name, “Zevel,” I used the landline phone in my father’s jewelry studio. My grandfather, an Orthodox Jew and president of his shul, was so upset that my Hebrew school teacher had unknowingly given me a name that means “trash” that he called the school himself to complain.
I have always eagerly collected items that are typically discarded or left behind: the pull tab from the soda I shared with my failed first kiss, instructions from golf clubs I only used when my mother punished me by dropping me off at the driving range, or the receipt from an embarrassing dinner at Hooters on my sixteenth birthday. These things carry a certain magic that runs throughout my life. I save them as a record of my history; souvenirs of moments I never want to forget.
Zevel’s queer aesthetic is enmeshed in the way I handle the objects; certain things are folded to obscure them, while others are tucked into the still life as if they’re trying to hide. This way of choosing what to show and what to withhold recalls the experience of my closeted youth. Even as an adult, this tendency to conceal happens almost automatically; on some level I still feel the need to hide some of these things away.
These photographs survey my childhood and adolescence in the 1980s and 90s, striking a playful balance between pop culture ephemera and mementos from my personal archive. I present them as modern reliquaries to remind us of the innocence and joy of our formative years when we explore multiple senses of self.
The objects drip with both intention and nostalgia. The images contain a co-mingling of past and present, not just my own, but the audience’s as well. One particular trinket might resonate with a viewer’s own memories, highlighting a mysterious cross between shared culture and the individual search for identity. Zevel elevates the mundane to the mythical and encourages each of us to reconsider our own treasure troves of tangible history. Many of the objects in Zevel were passed on to me, and I have since passed them on. Through sharing, objects become infused with meaning, compounding a narrative that transcends generations.
An intimate story accompanies each still life, hinting at the meaning assigned to the object(s). This is my way of offering voyeuristic opportunities for the viewer to know me, from first love to first heartbreak and back again. This series speaks to a queer future because it embodies a queer, or queered, past, and you can’t have one without the other.
As a part of the physical exhibition of Zevel in 2019, I included a stack of diaries from my teenage years. There were two individuals who came back to the exhibition a second time to finish reading the diaries cover to cover. When the first person finished reading, they passed me on their way out and simply said, “Thank you.” The other person cried, so I sat and cried with them. Occasionally, they would pause to share something from their life that had been brought to the surface by something I wrote in 1995. Sharing my past was as magical as it was nerve-wracking, but it’s vital to building a future. Queer is more than an aesthetic or a lifestyle. It isn’t a label put upon us by society or family, and it isn’t a novelty to be handled without care.
Queer is a gift.
