Daniel Mirer was born in Brooklyn, New York and currently resides in Redwood City, California where he works as an artist/photographer and educator. Mirer received his 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 prestigious artist residency programs including the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program, the Bronx Museum of the Arts’ Artists in the Marketplace, Regional Central American & Caribbean Contemporary Arts Forum in Honduras, the Starry Night Artist Residence in New Mexico and the Baxter Street @ CCNY Workspace artist residency. Daniel Mirer along with other international artist had recently received through project leader Professor Katharina Bosse two start-up funding grants from the German government, Kunststiftung (Art Foundation) North Rhine Westphalia & Landesverband Westfalen-Lippe (Foundation for the Region of Westfalia-Lippe to begin the creation of a body of work titled “Thingstätten in Deutschland.” Mirer was also the recipient of the New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for photography and the Dana Artist Fellowship for continuing education.
Mirer’s artwork is part of museum and institution collections including the Special Collections of the Library of University of Leiden, Leiden, Netherlands, Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona Beach, Florida, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Houston, Texas, Dallas Contemporary Art Museum, Dallas, Texas, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts, Fidelity Investments, Boston, Massachusetts, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio.
Indifferent West
“Indifferent West” is a photographic and video series that investigates the personification of a North American identity. The American West and its touristic architectural locations are linked to a contemporary landscape as metaphors. Through this project, I photograph the found and sentimental representations of the mythic frontier of the American west. The images are of touristic sites; places that are of the familiar and cliché but also creates a picturesqueness image of an Americana landscape. Through the institutions that perpetuate the mythic models through tourism, the results are that the American West is an idea that has become a vast site for elements of kitsch about a space intersecting with the comic and history ripe for consumption.
These photographs represent private entertainment industries for tourism projecting the notions of the exotification of the romantic, untamed, hostile wilderness, seeming lifeless and void, which becomes wrapped in mythology attending to what is called the American West. The “West” had become a place where the Lone Ranger, Marlboro Man, and the Noble Savage, were invented and where they continue to reside in the collective cultural unconscious of the American cultural identity. The western landscape is re-contextualize from reality and is indifferent to historical facts establishing an American psyche of the make-believe, which has become into a self-referent notion of ambiguity.
To view more of Daniel’s work, please visit his website.