The 20th century critic Walter Benjamin believed that fragments carry the full weight of the whole. Within a sliver of ancient ceramic, the civilization that produced it, within a polished piece of coral, the entire reef. Like a mosaic, each tessera is both part and total. The artist Nicolas Lefebvre has a similar view of the artifacts he collects and composes. Traveling the world since childhood—through West Africa and the Peruvian highlands, coastal Portugal and India—he finds natural and man-made objects that suggest the existence of a greater whole, one that exceeds continents, cultures, and ages. By combining the discrete parts into resonant, unified sculptures, he points to what he’s called our collective memory: the symbolic inheritance that binds humans across space and time.