Honors in the Arts Cohort 2022-23

Honors in the Arts

a photo of Tamilore Awosile wearing white shirt and red jacket. He's in a spotlight and the photo is edited to have bright rings circling the spotlight

TAMILORE AWOSILE | Black Atlantic

BS Symbolic Systems

As a Black people in the diaspora, we are constantly asked questions of whether we belong, and how we fit in. Where are you from? Where is home to you? Do you feel British? Do you feel American? We all navigate these questions differently, and our different experiences shape the way in which we interact with the world around us.

Inspired by my own experiences navigating these questions, Black Atlantic is a multi-media project which explores how young Black people from across Diaspora navigate these questions of identity and belonging. Black Atlantic began with me interviewing 8 young Black people in my hometown of London, United Kingdom, and here at Stanford University.

At the core of the project is an album of music, for which I wrote original music and chose covers to address different themes that emerged throughout the interviews, intricately weaving in samples from the interviews into each track. The footage from these interviews, as well as behind the scenes footage from the making of the album, will be incorporated into two music videos. The project will conclude with an album release concert Friday 26th May. The concert will involve a full performance of the album with a live band, in addition to visuals created specifically the occasion, to form an immersive audio-visual experience.

Link to the project here

TYRA BLACKWATER | nizhónígo nihaa ’ádahałyą́ | they are taking good care of us

BA Art Practice

Project Statement

nizhónígo nihaa ’ádahałyą́ is a collection of multi-medium works by Tyra Blackwater that challenges the way people think about photography and traditional Native American art practices. Intertwining weaving, beading and sand painting with different forms of experimentation and alternative forms of photography including cyanotypes and polaroids, this collection will push ideas of traditional Native American art forms that have been heavily influenced by colonization and capitalism. Native American art used to be solely about creation and culture, until it was influenced to be about profit by the trading post era, when colonizers began to see a value that they could exploit. Experimentation with natural materials like earth pigments, sand and Navajo churro wool will reimagine the way art interacts and exist with the natural world. This work will be focused on ideas of identity, kinship, and exploitation of Native American communities and art practices. nizhónígo nihaa ’ádahałyą́ explores the dimensionality and sculptural qualities of photography and ways to transform the idea of what a photograph is as a modern art practice in relation to redefining what Native American art is perceived as.

ANA CHEN | Prototype One

BAH International Relations

Project Statement

Which memories are left behind in the creation of national history? Which lives are left behind in the process of modernization? Set in an alternate-fiction version of Shenzhen, Prototype One follows Feng Yuxia, an intern at the city’s most prestigious venture capital firm, as she invests in a Western technology that clears ghosts off haunted properties for land development. But when the technology fails, she must team up with denizens of the city’s criminal underbelly to stop the ghosts she unwittingly unleashed, and to salvage her own reputation. Which memories are carried in these ghosts, and can she bear to carry the consequences of their destruction?

Prototype One draws from the works of Nalo Hopkinson, Aihwa Ong, and Esme Weijun Wang to explore the malleability of histories and memories, the inscription of traumas upon a body, and the collision of the personal, the political, and the profitable.

KAITLIN HSU | Rites

BA English, coterm MA Earth Sciences

Project Statement

“There is another world, other than / this one we choose to live in.” ―Li Bai

Rites is a series of zines including poems (erasure, persona, ekphrastic), collaged photos, and paintings in conversation with each other, other scholars and poets, and broader (queer/Asian) communities. These zines conceptualize Taiwanese rituals of womanhood, examining what it means to burn incense, put on makeup, wear qipao, make offerings to ancestors—a continual series of performances—all of which accrue into the relentless experience of becoming a Taiwanese woman in America. Through collecting these personal fragments, Rites serves as a window not only into the construction of a self but also into the construction of a personal archive.

A black and white photo of Sarah Lee, edited with white pencil sketches of flowers

SARAH LEE | Patmos

BA Philosophy & Religious Studies, Minor in Creative Writing

Project Statement

Eschatology is a study of endings, as humans imagine and construct them: the end of the world, the end of human life, or the end of a smaller reality as we know it. Necessarily, it is also a study of hope. To have an eschatology is to see that in the world there is something painfully, outrageously wrong. It is to hope, in some specific way, to correct it.

This year, I’m sitting down and doing some thinking about my own eschatologies – the endings I fear in my life and hope for in the world. Patmos is the emerging project: a script about three people, the world they inhabit together, and the worlds-to-come they dream of differently. What can be reconciled? and what do we do in the meantime?

A close up photo of Dija Manly laughing, edited with brightly colored doodles

DIJA MANLY | tending my garden

BA Engineering

Project Statement

Presented as a single channel video installation, tending my garden is a piece that challenges the conceptualization of motherhood, especially of Black motherhood. It primarily documents my mother, who is battling stage 4 cancer and navigating her own relationship with caregiving and receiving care. Who are Black mothers outside of the labels we want them to subscribe to? What are the stories of the mothers we intentionally overlook or frown upon? In what ways does caretaking take away from people, from relationships? Inspired heavily by the play Infamous Mothers by Sagashus Levingston, the work of bell hooks, and general Black feminist thought, I intend to capture the essence of my mother, and to push viewers to think more expansively about nurturing. This piece will be presented as a fantastical document.

Fantastical Document: A type of documentary in which the spiritual and metaphorical nature of stories are captured through metaphorical, scripted fantastical scenes (in addition to the more traditional components of documentary film). I create my films in this way so as to better articulate my own experiences with the material I’m capturing instead of relying solely on intentional editing and storytelling.

View the project here

ADAM MATTHEW CHIN | Wind in the Buffalo Grass

BA Film and Media Studies

Project Statement

Free Love. Eco-terrorism. Peyote Church.

These are a few of the topics that Wind in the Buffalo Grass — an episodic streaming series about Hippie Communes in northern New Mexico in the 60s, 70s & 80s — aims to explore.

Having grown up part-time with my hippy father in the mountains above Santa Fe, I have some first-hand experience living in a cabin with no running water, an outhouse, and limited electricity. My “aunts” and “uncles” experimented with nudism, psychedelics, alternative communities and “back to the land” environmentalism. I made papier-mâché animal costumes and stilt-walked in some of the first Earth Day pageants; played hide-and-seek amidst the barrels of natural tobacco used to start the American Spirit Cigarette Company; and made many treks to Taos Pueblo in the early morning on New Year’s Day to watch the Pueblo perform their sacred New Year’s dances.

Drawing inspiration from these experiences — and many more first-hand accounts from the Native Americans and Hippies that lived through it — I aim to paint an at times dramatic, at times darkly comedic, picture of the last frontier of the Old West on the cusp of the Information Age, warts and all.

a photo of Sherry Nolan wearing jeans and a tank top on a front porch, with white pencil sketches of flowers and berries

SHERRY MESTAN | Body and Face

BS Human Biology

Project Statement

“I feel like I am saying goodbye to my womanhood,” my mother told me on the morning before her double mastectomy. What does it mean to lose a physical part of yourself? How is this relationship complicated by a society that has determined our identity and self-worth are irrevocably tied to our bodies? The field of women’s health often fails to recognize the patriarchal and societal forces which have created a complex value of the “feminine” body.

Inspired by the experiences of women in my life, Body and Face explores how patients navigate their identity, relationships, and social roles in the face of the loss of their bodies through medical treatment. Through creative photographic portraiture, I will craft an expressive environment for the subject and capture the uniquely personal relationship they experience with their body. By giving these patients a voice and a face, Body and Face tells the stories of a double burden: overcoming medical challenges while grappling with shifting identities and values.

View the project website here

Photo of Matt Mettias, with the ocean in the background, bright sky colors

MATT METTIAS | untitled

BAS Psychology, BAS Science Technology and Society, Minor in Education and Symbolic Systems

Project Statement

For my Honors in the Arts final capstone product, I will be designing a mini chapbook composed of 7 new & original poems, each authored in a personal style that is to be read as a letter to my readers. Along with scaffolding support from my mentor Sam Sax, I'll be exploring the realms of universal human emotions. Furthermore, I'll be integrating skills, practices, and knowledge from the academic fields of Psychology + English (Poetry) accompanied by Visual Art Practice via original drawings. With the peer-editing and publishing skills with the help of my fellow poets from Stanford's Spoken Word Collective (SWC), I seek to capture glimpses into the human condition (think themes of birth, growing up, relationships, achievement, love, sickness, separation, loss, death, etc.) to both shed insight and spill depth into the universally unique experiences which make us human –– the life chapters which make us "us."

Read the project here

Photo of Huy Nguyen with an AI generated background of symmetrical shapes

HUY NGUYEN | The Gates of Artificial Heaven and Hell

BS Symbolic, Minor in Philosophy

Project Statement

The march of progress is marked by two competing desires: the first the urge to stay connected and remember the roots of past history, and the second the urge to create a new world independent of the past. In a post-human world where physical and digital spaces merge, how will we seek to establish our own new identities? The Gates of Artificial Heaven and Hell explores the blurred boundaries of human technological progress, through a multi-disciplinary interactive exhibit, bridging a spectrum of artistic mediums from physical to digital, from sculpture and painting to digital modeling to AI art.

A photo of Katherine Nolan wearing a grey sweater, edited with white pencil sketches of leaves around her

KATHERINE NOLAN | Remnants

BA Art History

Project Statement

A remnant is an object that bears the trace of another moment. It is durable and capable of traveling across vast fields of space and time. A shell is a remnant–it carries the contours of the organic body that created it but is untethered from that being’s transience. It drifts through the sea and winds up at one’s feet, speaking of an unfathomable life in an unfathomable place. A gem is also a remnant, a crystal formed deep within the earth and gradually uplifted, the most spectacular result of our earth’s restless surface.

The vast, desolate deserts of the American southwest are excellent places to encounter remnants. The ecosystem does not decay and regenerate as quickly as other places. Objects that form or are left there may remain for hundreds, thousands, even millions of years. The lack of dense human habitation and the sparseness of the landscape leave both earth and sky exposed, allowing the glow of the past to radiate farther than it can in other places.

Remnants is a collection of nonfiction essays centering around my encounters with objects in the Great Basin, the mountainous desert region that stretches between the Sierra Nevadas and the Rocky mountains. Consisting of Bones, Shells, Topaz, Gold, and Plastic, the collection attempts to trace the travels of objects and bodies throughout vast stretches of time and space, exploring issues of identity, racial injustice, motherhood, ecological grief, and the impact of landscape on the stories of our lives.

Read an excerpt of the project here

A photo of Danny Ritz in a grey sweater standing in an open field. Brightly colored balls have been edited into the top of the photo

DANNY RITZ | Run For Our Whole Lives

BA English, Minor in Music

Project Statement

I have always found ordinary things to be quite beautiful. More than this, I have felt a link between the two, the ordinary and beautiful. That they depend on each other, like seasons or spouses. My work aims to excavate this beauty-- to carve the extraordinary from the everyday. In my practice more broadly, I use spontaneity, improvisation, and randomness as instruments of hope wherever I can. I create stories that recast the trivial, neglected, and forgotten as beautiful. This is to convey that, as a friend once quipped, “if anything can happen, then anything good can happen.”

This project is an album that recasts musical totality as one of fullness, rather than largeness. Thematically, it recasts the fragility of memory into the age of information. How does the digitization--of ideas, of imagination, and of expression--affect the way we listen: the way we remember? In exploring this, the album explores two versions of each song--one recorded in real time with a band of musicians, and the other recorded in studio, with each of the parts tracked well-beforehand.

Honestly, the whole thing is fun for me. Plus, the people I work with seem to enjoy it, too. Hopefully my audience agrees.

Listen to the project here

a photo of Callum Tresnan wearing a winter coat on a dark street with blurred neon store fronts in the background

CALLUM TRESNAN | The Poet Writes to García Lorca Hoping for No Response

BA Comparative Literature

Project Statement

“¡Esa guirnalda! ¡pronto! ¡que me muero!” That garland! Quick! I’m dying! opens one of the eleven sonnets of Federico García Lorca’s unfinished poetic work, Sonetos del amor oscuro. Originally written in the 1930s before Lorca’s assassination by Franco’s forces, Sonetos didn’t resurface until the 80s when it was anonymously mailed to Spanish newspaper ABC. The poems addressed to an unnamed male lover treat the spiritual anguish of love and eroticism.

Callum Tresnan’s collection interpolates translations of Lorca’s Spanish sonnets into a sonnet crown redouble written in English. A sonnet crown redouble is a sequence of fifteen formal poems with each succeeding poem taking the last line of the preceding poem as its first line. The repeated lines build the fifteenth mastersonnet. This collection questions the natures and possibilities of love, union, and completion.

Read the project here

an illustration of an Asian person daintily holding a taco in front of a graffitied wall

JEFFREY WANG | Academy of Marginalized Superpowers

BA Art Practice

Project Statement

What started off as a zany pencil drawing comic in 2019, eventually evolved into a fully illustrated comedy webcomic series. Everyone in this world has a superpower, but most people’s powers are useless—marginal. Those with significant powers have banned together and taken control of the country, siphoning resources from the marginals, who can’t fight back. Academy of Marginalized Superpowers takes place in a school for marginal-powered students, where they participate in hijinks, struggling to prove themselves as somewhat-significant.

For the 2022-2023 academic year, Academy of Marginalized Superpowers, is currently publishing its episodes for season 1. Behind the scenes, I’ll be scripting, editing, and storyboarding seasons 2 and 3. In these upcoming seasons, I want the comic to shift its genre from being a gag comedy to a more serialized drama, but still retaining its absurdist humor. Through this project, I want to explore the metaphor and lore of the Marginal Powers Universe.

View the project here

Inter-Arts Minor

Photo of Shridhar Athinarayanan wearing a blue jacket and yellow hat with a rocky landscape in the background

SHRIDHAR ATHINARAYANAN | Untitled

BS Mathematical and Computational Sciences

edited photo of Adi Garner wearing a black shirt, with green arms and paper cutout eyes in front of neon hearts

ADI GARNER | Gravity Vehicles

BA Art History

A photo of Maya Passmore holding flowers and lightly edited to look like a pencil illustration

MAYA PASSMORE | Living in Nature

BS Earth Systems