Drawn from decades of road trips across the American Southwest, Mirer’s jarring images aim to both play into and subtly disrupt our collective cultural memory of the mythic American Frontier. A tourist himself, he documents desertscapes and roadside attractions so familiar from countless Hollywood Western movies, while simultaneously exposing their deeper contradictions: romanticised ruins, hyperreal facades, and ironic representations of water politics occupying the space. In Indifferent West, cowboy legends clash with Native histories, kitsch collides with the climate crisis, and remnants of settler colonial fantasies are rebranded for tourist consumption.

Included in the exhibition are bold and brightly coloured photographs that present stark juxtapositions laced with a dark sense of humor to highlight the absurdity of American myth-making alongside the ever-so-pressing issues of water politics and environmental devastation. Shot in square format, and so rejecting traditional landscape conventions, these breath-taking images at first glance reveal the sweeping beauty of vast landscapes. However, on closer inspection they uncover tattered tourist sites, rusting billboards, flooded parking lots, and abandoned swimming pools dotting the historical American Frontier.

Indifferent West is a reflection on the American psyche and its uneasy relationship with history, land, and identity. The title itself points to a more profound “indifference”: not only of the land to its own history, but of a society complicit in sustaining romanticised myths while overlooking the economic, human, and environmental exploitation beneath them. Through his allusive photographs, Mirer confronts a nation entangled in its own mythology and urges viewers to reckon with their complicity in the ongoing disruption of the landscape.

Daniel Mirer is a Brooklyn-born, California-based Artist-Photographer and educator who holds a Master of Fine Arts in Photography from the California Institute of the Arts. Mirer has participated in numerous international artist residencies, lectures, and exhibitions, and his work is held in prominent collections, including the Special Collections of the Library of the University of Leiden, Netherlands; Southeast Museum of Photography, Florida; Dallas Contemporary Art Museum, Texas and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania.