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? Th e 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