Dar San Agustin — CalArts Post Grad Show Y25

Dar San Agustin

(Photo/Media MFA 25)
IG: @photographsbydar

View From My Balcony, Not Le Gras (But This Window is a Lie Anyway); To Rest, To Harden, 2024 – 2025

Born in the Philippines, Dar San Agustin works across photography, installation, and performance to explore how people adapt when stretched too thin, especially those treated as disposable or outside systems of care. She uses low-cost or found materials carrying stories of survival, traces of what gets left behind. To Rest, To Harden displays cemented “Good Morning” towels in gestures of rest, almost like a tableau. These once-pliable symbols of service are now fossilized — soft fabrics turned to stone. What once absorbed traces of care now resists touch entirely. Transformed into rigid sculptures that can no longer perform their function, they make visible the invisible labor that keeps others comfortable. Dar asks here, as throughout her practice using humble materials — toys, candy, oyster shells, salt — what kinds of memory can an object hold? And within that question: What does it cost to survive? Who gets discarded? What gets carried on?
View From My Balcony, Not Le Gras (But This Window is a Lie Anyway) presents an infrared photo of Singapore’s last kampong (village) hung like a faux window with curtains, evoking what’s seen and unseen — disappearing rural life and the traces of service that survive modernization. The false window references Nicéphore Niépce’s View from the Window at Le Gras (1826 or 1827) — widely considered the first permanent photograph. The window creates an illusion of architectural opening, of a view onto elsewhere, while presenting a photograph in place of sight. The last kampong is rendered in otherworldly tones, making visible what standard photography cannot capture while also marking the village as endangered, soon to disappear under pressure of mega-development corporations. The curtains frame this false window like theatrical staging. We construct views; architecture promises access while often controlling what can be seen. In insisting this window is a lie, San Agustin recognizes the necessity of such constructed illusions. Sometimes we need to pretend a window is there ‘to let the light in, or to imagine a way out.’ Together, the window and the towel echo one another: both are thresholds between care and exhaustion, endurance and disappearance.

PROXY CHIMERA ORACLE

CalArts 2025