New Mexico-based artist Max Lehman brings archaeology into dialogue with science fiction in Ancestral Androids at Hecho a Mano, a presentation that imagines artifacts of tomorrow shaped by visual languages of the distant past. Studying Pre-Columbian art history, Lehman points to the ancient Mayans\u0014whose elaborate temples bore images on carved rock slabs\u0014and to the Aztec sun stone as a remarkable example of Mexica sculpture. His sculptures channel those references forward, picturing a world far beyond today\u0019s developments in robotics and machine learning.<\/p>\n
Lehman envisions his ceramics as objects that future archaeologists might unearth without context. \u001cI resist providing complete explanations because archaeology rarely offers certainty,\u001d he writes. \u001cWe reconstruct civilizations from fragments, projecting ourselves into the spaces left empty by time.\u001d The exhibition also brushes against the scale of contemporary data and archives, asking what information could endure over the next thousand years or more, and how AI might shape which stories persist as fact or drift into myth. \u001cArtists understandably worry about AI appropriating their ideas,\u001d Lehman says. \u001cMy own work, however, remains deeply rooted in the physical act of making\u0014there is still no machine that can throw a ceramic vessel with the intuition, hesitation, and accumulated experience of human hands. Clay continues to preserve evidence of the maker in ways that cannot be simulated.\u001d<\/p>\n
Vividly colorful figures\u0014at once cartoonish and occasionally clownish\u0014nod toward sacred archetypes while keeping their intentions opaque. Expressions skew slightly unsettling, and additional faces often appear on bellies or foreheads, hinting at collectivity and shared consciousness. Titles underscore the fusion of eras: works such as \u001cThe Mother of Machines\u001d and \u001cThe Sapphire Sage\u001d invoke devotionals recast through speculative technology. As the artist puts it, \u001cThe sculptures ask us to consider what happens when artificial beings become old enough to have ancestors, old enough to leave ruins, and old enough for their own history to become myth.\u001d<\/p>\n
Ancestral Androids continues through November 1 in Santa Fe.<\/p>\n