Tessa Hughes-Freeland

In the years before Ronald Reagan took office, Manhattan was in ruins. But true art has never come from comfort, and it was precisely those dire circumstances that inspired artists like Jim Jarmusch, Lizzy Borden, and Amos Poe to produce some of their best works. Taking their cues from punk rock and new wave music, these young maverick filmmakers confronted viewers with a stark reality that stood in powerful contrast to the escapist product being churned out by Hollywood.

A no-holds-barred portrait of addiction, RAT TRAP is an unflinching portrayal of a junkie injecting heroin cut with footage of (already expired) rodents being tortured and maimed, all underscored by a fiery guitar rock solo, painting a grim picture of numbing daily grind, dependency, and domestic urban squalor.

After a vengeful sorceress is tortured and killed by a corrupt industrialist looking to harness the spectral powers of Red Spirit Lake, her niece arrives in snow covered Angel Falls to settle her aunt's estate.

THE BUG/Lost Movie is a film by Tessa Hughes-Freeland, created between 1998 - 2018.

Inspired by and loosely based on the introduction to Blue Of Noon by Georges Bataille, the title was taken from the name of the main character. It is a short portrayal of one person's descent into a state of degradation. In spite of her affluence, Dirty is rendered helpless in the hands of those she sought to patronise. The shifting points of view of this film allow the viewer to experience the protagonist as she is seen by herself, and how the world sees her.

A short film by Tessa Hughes-Freeland: The Story of the Little Green Man was made for an exhibition Mike Osterhout curated at Hallwalls entitled "Nepotism".

Playboy is made from bits of vintage porno films, boxing films, westerns, and adventure and horror films.

A film exploring the nature of sex and gender roles. Nymph, a fairy, walks and dances through a woodland before being pursued by Pan, an evil spirit.

Documenting Graffiti culture in a basketball court in the Bronx. The filmmaker was accompanied by Martin Wong who said, "bring your camera". The Graffiti Hall of Fame is the result.

Inspired by a dream, it is a reflection on the sentiment of loss. Working with film material directly, by combining handmade film, slides made from found plants and animals, and original ethereal imagery it considers abstract concepts within a romantic framework to create a visual poem. "The film is hand made using letraset, insects and plants" - Tess Hughes-Freeland

Carlo McCormick was invited to curate an East Village Art show at a gallery in Richmond, Virginia. Filmmaker Tessa Hughes-Freeland took filmic evidence of the infamous exhibition that featured downtown artists such as David Wojnarowicz, Marilyn Minter, Luis Frangella and more painting naughty murals while on acid.

Tessa Hughes-Freeland’s “Baby Doll” is a tiny slice of cinéma vérité from 1982 about the girls working the now defunct Baby Doll Lounge on Church and White St. in downtown Manhattan. It captures a moment before NYC got sanitized.

Mike Bidlo’s performative re-creation of Yves Klein's, "Anthropométries de l'époque bleue" at the Palladium in NYC.

Rhonda Goes to Hollywood functions in a similar fashion, exploring the very existence of Hollywood's stars as merely social constructions. The film follows Rhonda Zwillinger as she reenacts glamour poses in her camp/trash bedroom, and as she walks down Hollywood Boulevard. This is intercut with found footage (depicting various stars, such as Elvis, Bardot, Marilyn etc), which, like that in Play Boy, is re-photographed and fucked up so that the celluloid itself is as much of the film's theme as the images it depicts. The film thus positions the ironic glamorous stances of Rhonda as part of a series of repetitious gestures which serve to signify glamour and stardom (for example Rhonda's star on the Boulevard), while film stardom itself is shown to be a transient myth.

1983 short by Tessa Hughes-Freeland

1986 performance of the Butthole Surfers, documented on film by NYC filmmaker Tessa Hughes-Freeland.

Watch Out! is a lighthearted poetic comment which addresses concepts of male voyeurism. Exploring clichés to the point of saturation, these combinations present different ways of learning to look and looking to learn.

A surrealistic narrative is created which collapses different realities into one, by means of both similarities and juxtapositions. There is a certain irony in creating such a narrative which revels in the popular romanticism of a sleep state, as a means to open the door to an interior world of alternative realities and parallel universes.

Originally one side of a live multiple projection, INSTINCT mixes irrationally convergent imagery. An iconography of the intangible and intuitive, time lapses as elemental aspects of the female psyche. Psychedelic disorder and repetition, visual collage suggests a alternative syncretism.

This film was made for an exhibition entitled "My Icon" Jumping off the springboard of the popular religious iconography of mother and child, as a mother I took my child as the subject.