New Mexico-based artist Max Lehman, who studies Pre-Columbian art history, is presenting a solo exhibition titled 'Ancestral Androids' at Hecho a Mano in Santa Fe, on view through 1 November. The show gathers ceramic sculptures that stand with one foot in the advanced civilisations of the past and the other in a distant future, long after today's developments in robotics and machine learning have faded into history. The works carry playful, evocative titles: 'The Aubergine Oracle from the City of Caracol', 'Petro who is Predicting the Unpredictable', 'The Malachite Mage', 'The Mother of Machines', 'Sapphire Sage', 'Mayan Max and His Pre-Colo iPad', 'The Duchess of Digital Data', 'The Hope for Environmental Renewal', 'Fiery Phineas and His Tablet of Doom' and 'Cecil Sunspot'. Made in ceramic with acrylic and metallic paint or in glazed ceramic, they are vividly coloured, cartoonish figures with slightly unsettling expressions – sometimes clownish, sometimes blank like carved stone – and additional faces appearing on bellies or foreheads, suggesting a shared or collective consciousness. Lehman's central conceit is temporal displacement. He imagines his pieces being excavated by archaeologists many centuries from now, their exact origin and function lost to time – a mirror image of our own relationship to the Maya, whose carved temple slabs intrigue precisely because so much remains unknown, or to the Aztec calendar stone. He deliberately withholds complete explanations, noting that 'archaeology rarely offers certainty', and that civilisations are always reconstructed from fragments. The work also probes what survives in an age of unprecedented data and archives: in a thousand years, what information will remain, and how will artificial intelligence shape which stories are told as fact or myth? For Lehman, clay itself is part of the answer – no machine, he argues, can throw a vessel with the intuition, hesitation and accumulated experience of human hands – even as his sculptures ask what happens when artificial beings grow old enough to have ancestors, ruins and myths of their own.