Indifferent West

Elliott Gallery is excited to present:

Indifferent West

by Daniel Mirer

27th September 2025 - 17th January 2026

at Elliott Gallery | Tussen de Bogen 91 | 1013 JB, Amsterdam

Indifferent West is a visual investigation into the mythology, commercialisation and environmental disruption of the American West. The exhibition features a selection of Mirer’s meticulously composed 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.

Drawing from decades of road trips across the American Southwest, Mirer’s exploration of the Western landscape aims to both play into and subtly disrupt our collective cultural memory of the mythic American frontier. A tourist himself, he documents familiar desertscapes and roadside attractions seen in countless Hollywood Westerns, 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 brightly coloured photographs that present stark juxtapositions laced with a dark sense of humour 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 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 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 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 was born in Brooklyn, New York, currently based in Northern California, is an artist/photographer and educator. Mirer holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute and his 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, Daytona Beach, Florida; Dallas Contemporary Art Museum, Dallas, Texas and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

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