Max Lehman: Ancestral Androids

For Max Lehman, each sculpture begins with a story — some originate in dreams, others in memories of childhood toys, comics, science fiction, and machines that captured his imagination long before he understood how they worked. Those memories become intertwined with imagined histories until each piece feels less like something invented than something uncovered. “I resist providing complete explanations because archaeology rarely offers certainty,” Lehman notes. “We reconstruct civilizations from fragments, projecting ourselves into the spaces left empty by time.” These sculptures function in the same way — each viewer brings their own memories, experiences, and questions to the work, completing stories that remain intentionally unfinished. “Ultimately, Ancestral Androids is less about predicting the future than imagining its past,” Lehman says. “The 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.”