Lich
Ryan Bock
Curated by Celine Cunha
10/18/25 - 11/23/25
Note from the Artist:
History is the momentum pushing the world in the present toward the future. Our lives are the root of mythology and fable, if led with echoes from the past. Passed down from generation to generation, stories shape us as individuals, cultures, and nations. Stories have the power to unite us, but also have the power to divide, dehumanize, and destroy. I have had the incredible privilege of living and painting in the small town of Lich, Germany, for three months—a town where my ancestry has been traced back to the 1700s. My own story has brought me here as an American artist of German Jewish descent. My research has led me down a winding and seemingly disjointed path, from the Teutonic mythologies of the Brothers Grimm to the American inception of the eugenics movement and beyond. Th e German-to-American pipeline (and vice versa) of culture and science seems shrouded in secrecy and oftentimes nefarious intent. For example, the lawful and legal segregation by race in America before the Civil Rights Movement provided direct inspiration for Hitler’s reign of terror. And Walt Disney seemingly usurped and neutered the fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm to shape American values in the minds of young people. Along this winding path, and always in my practice, I am driven by fundamental questions: How are neighbors led to hate each other? How can humanity continue to sink so low as to commit atrocities against itself? How have we not learned from the cyclical nature of our histories? The answers, I fear, lie in the weaponization of our stories. With the continuation of development of AI and other technologies, our ability to distinguish fact from fiction, truth from falsehood, are increasingly at risk.
-Ryan Bock
Resistance and Myth
Curated by Celine Cunha and MOONCALF's Ryan Bock
10/18/25 - 11/23/25
Resistance and Myth is a collective exploration of myth
as both weapon and refuge.
Throughout history, myth has been wielded to consolidate power: shaping identity, rewriting history, and enforcing obedience through grand narratives, propaganda, and the seduction of the “official” story. In today’s endless churn of short-form video and curated feeds, our attention spans fracture, making it easier for authoritarian myths to slip into the collective psyche unnoticed. Yet myth also contains its own antidote: the capacity to ignite rebellion, to expose imposed realities, and to galvanize the imagination into acts of reinvention. This exhibition presents artists who operate in that charged space.
Accra Shepp’s Gunners harness formal technique and temporal tension to strip cultural filters from the narrative of contemporary gun ownership, using photography itself to dismantle myths of identity, fear, and power. Laurie Lipton’s meticulous draughtsmanship conjures graphite visions that reveal the hidden machinery beneath contemporary politics. Judy Greenberg’s intuitive, surrealist collages depict distorted Faces shaped by personal and political narratives unobstructed by societal expectation or individual censorship, and Peter Kennard’s uncompromising photomontages strip propaganda’s veneer to its raw violence.
Collectively, their work confronts the authoritarian gaze with visual counter-narratives, derail prescribed thought with unexpected forms, and treat creative expression as a battalion for freedom. Their work resists trend, breaks formation, and forges a mythology of liberation.
