Threshold
My photograph Threshold has been accepted into the Juried Artists Council ACE 2026 exhibition, themed “Timeless Traditions – Modern Context.” The work is a photograph produced as a dye-infused aluminum print and centers on a small ritual object that has passed through multiple generations of my family. The subject of the photograph is a mezuzah.
This mezuzah hung on the doorframe of my great-grandfather’s home in Ukraine. Its history before that is unknown. What is known is where it traveled afterward. It made its way with my family to an apartment in the Bronx, New York. From there, it was installed on the doorframe of a house in La Habra, California, and later on the doorframe of an apartment in Hollywood. Today, generations later, it occupies a place in my home.
Based on its size, weight, material, and decorative style, the mezuzah appears to be a late 19th to early 20th century Eastern European domestic mezuzah, likely dating from circa 1890–1915, within Jewish communities of late Imperial Russia or the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was not made as a ceremonial or decorative object, but as an everyday household item, intended to be used, reinstalled, and lived with.
A mezuzah is affixed to the doorposts of Jewish homes and contains a handwritten parchment with verses from the Shema, instructing the Jewish people to keep these words present in daily life. This mezuzah survived not because it was preserved as an artifact, but because it continued to serve that original purpose. It passed through doorways, migrations, and decades in which many homes, families, and traditions did not survive. It is an everyday threshold object that endured movement, displacement, and resettlement, which makes Threshold a precise and intentional title.
Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a day dedicated to remembering the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust and the destruction of Jewish life across Europe. For many families, entire histories were erased. For others, fragments endured, sometimes in the form of objects that continued to be carried, installed, and used.
Threshold reflects that endurance. Shown in a contemporary exhibition context and produced using modern photographic processes as a dye-infused aluminum print, the mezuzah remains what it has always been: a marker of continuity at the doorway, quietly present across time.
Threshold will be on view at The Artists Center, a museum-quality exhibition facility in Palm Desert operated by the Artists Council. The Juried Artists Council ACE 2026 exhibition opens with a reception on February 5, from 5–7 pm, and runs through March 1. The Artists Center is located at 72-567 Highway 111, Palm Desert, California 92260. You are invited to attend the opening reception and to visit the exhibition during its run. Please join us. Thank You!
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