In Surface Imperfect, Benjamin Freedman continues his intricate examination of memory’s fragility through digital construction. Expanding on his earlier series Positive Illusions, Freedman returns to a single rendered scene and subjects it to endless recomposition. This image, repeatedly revised through CGI, becomes the site of both excavation and invention. Across these variations—some anchored in personal memory, while others drift toward the vernacular fictions of cinema and art history—Freedman exposes memory’s essential instability: how it is shaped not only by what we remember, but by how we wish to remember. Freedman displays these images as atemporal fragments, in that they do not succeed one another but are present simultaneously. Thus, Surface Imperfect constitutes a spaceless, timeless outline that catches the multiple possibilities of a singular memory all at once.

Crucially, the work draws on the language of surface imperfections—scratches, smudges, dents, and subtle irregularities that CGI artists deliberately introduce to lend digital objects the texture of the real. Freedman appropriates these techniques not merely as aesthetic devices but as conceptual tools. Each imperfection, culled from a library of shared digital assets, arrives pre-worn, already carrying the traces of another time, another use. By layering borrowed textures onto his own personal memory, Freedman creates complex arrangements of domesticity that evoke familiarity while simultaneously destabilizing it. Much like the CGI surfaces he manipulates, memory is composed through substitution and projection, formed as much by what is available to us (cultural images, language, visual codes) as by what is internally held. In this way, Freedman’s grafting of foreign imperfections onto personal content speaks to how memory is both manipulated and manipulable—something we continually render with tools not entirely our own. The artist has tampered with the data, and so has time itself.


Curated by Erin Reznick