Eduardo Sarabia, The Passenger, 2021. All photos: Lance Gerber. ON OUR LONG DRIVE through the desert of the Coachella Valley chasing the artworks and installations of Desert X 2021, my fifteen-year-old daughter and I drove past the El Dorado Estates. Scrubby bushes in the pale-brown soil stretched back into the vast and vacant desert behind a cinderblock wall advertising the never-realized development named after the elusive, imaginary city of gold. In the hundred miles we spent crisscrossing the desert, we passed through the shimmering black cells of solar farms and clusters of rusty corrugated shacks, past plastic-surgery centers and boarded-up resorts boasting hot springs and air-conditioned rooms near faded tract houses ablaze with Trump signs. All this just a short jaunt from chic shopping districts flying rainbow pride flags and selling mid-century furniture in upscale boutiques, their glass walls reflecting back hard blue sky and distant snowcapped mountains visible from everywhere in the valley.