Positive Illusions
Benjamin Freedman
MACK
English
Hardcover
144 pages
210 × 280 mm
2025
ISBN 9781915743862
Using CGI, Canadian artist Benjamin Freedman presents a captivating image sequence which meticulously reconstructs his childhood memories of a family road trip to Maine in 1999. Blurring the line between reality and simulation, these surreal images toy with the ephemerality of memory and its inseparability from fantasy. Freedman’s recreated scenes of roadside diners, pools, and picnics create a visceral and sensory dreamscape, evoking the sounds and smells attached to his childhood recollections.
These digitally constructed images explore how technology permits us to revisit and reimagine the past in ways that feel both familiar and uncanny. Distinctions between personal recollection and collective nostalgia are compromised, creating an idiosyncratic visual realm saturated with shared emotions and histories. Freedman’s use of digital tools to recapture nostalgic scenes underscores the fluidity of memory while also challenging traditional conventions of the photographic medium.
(Source: https://www.thelibraryproject.ie/products/positive-illusions-benjamin-freedman)
About the Artist
Benjamin Freedman is a lens-based artist working within sculpture, video and photography. His practice often revisits and examines complex histories through extensive research and study. He is interested in photographic research as a form of pseudo archaeology where reinterpretation and disruption lead to restorative discoveries. While probing the relative truths and deceptions of photography, he purposefully adopts visual vocabularies from genres such as science fiction and horror in an effort to create expanded documentary projects. He self-published his first photography book in 2015, and has exhibited extensively across the greater Toronto area, most recently at Pumice Raft Gallery, Stephen Bulger Gallery, The Image Centre, 8eleven Gallery, Art Gallery of Mississauga, and Division Gallery and has shared his work internationally at the Aperture Foundation in New York City.
https://benjaminfreedman.net/
(Source: https://benjaminfreedman.net/positive-illusions)
About the Publisher
MACK is an independent publisher of award-winning books on contemporary art, critical theory, film and architecture. We work with pioneering creative minds and institutions across the globe and pride ourselves on the rigour and care that goes into every stage of the book-making process.
https://mackbooks.eu/
(Source: https://mackbooks.eu/pages/about-mack)
