Stuck in the Mud, Utah 2021
Elliott Gallery is excited to present:
Indifferent West
An Exhibition and Forthcoming Book
by Daniel Mirer
Indifferent West is a new solo exhibition and forthcoming book launch by Artist-Photographer Daniel Mirer on September 27, 2025. Offering a powerful reflection on today's pressing socio-political issues; Mirer’s visually arresting photographic work is a critical exploration of American history, identity, and environmental crisis through the mythic American West.
Indifferent West is a salient visual investigation into the mythology, commercialisation and environmental disruption of the Western landscape. The exhibition features a selection of Mirer’s meticulously composed, vivid photographs spanning over 30 years, capturing the strange beauty and haunting irony of a landscape defined more by fantasy than fact. Mirer's forthcoming book of the same title, showcasing 108 photographs, launches in conjunction with the show at Elliott Gallery.
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.
Train Trestle, Utah 2024
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 deeper “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.
Swimming Pool by Desert Landscape, Utah 2023
The exhibition opening event and book launch will take place on 27 September, 2025 at Elliott Gallery, Amsterdam. Attendees are invited to join the Artist for a book signing, an evening of conversation, and a reception celebrating the exhibition.
The exhibition runs from September 27, 2025 until January 17, 2026.
For press inquiries, interviews, event information and review copies of the book, please contact us at info@elliott.gallery